Muscle mass and strength decline with age, a long-term consequence of accumulating molecular damage and its effects on muscle stem cell populations and neuromuscular junctions, among other mechanisms. Once past an arbitrary line in the sand, this loss is defined as an age-related disease and called sarcopenia, a part of age-related frailty. Here, researchers show that the state of sarcopenia correlates with the presence of age-related cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. This is not surprising: all of these conditions arise from the same underlying forms of damage to cells and tissues that accumulate with age.
Sarcopenia, the progressive loss of muscle mass and function, is a common condition in older adults and has been linked to both cardiovascular disease (CVD) and chronic respiratory diseases (CRD). However, the association between long-term changes of sarcopenia and cardiorespiratory multimorbidity remains underexplored. This study aims to investigate how changes in sarcopenia burden over time relate to cardiorespiratory multimorbidity. Data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) were used, including 5,186 participants with mean age of 58.2 ± 8.4 years. Sarcopenia was assessed using criteria for muscle mass, strength, and physical performance.
A total of 301 (5.8%) participants experienced cardiorespiratory multimorbidity. Four distinct sarcopenia trajectory groups were identified: persistently low, moderate-to-low, low-to-high, and persistently high burden. Compared to the reference (persistently low group), the low-to-high trajectory of sarcopenia burden had the strongest association with cardiorespiratory multimorbidity (odds ratio, OR: 2.64), followed by the persistently high group (OR: 2.05) and moderate-to-low group (OR: 1.90). Thus Changes in sarcopenia burden are significantly associated with cardiorespiratory multimorbidity, with a rapid increase in sarcopenia burden (low-to-high trajectory) being particularly detrimental.
