2023-05-16 17:07:41
People who are healthy but have accumulated fat in their muscles, known as myosteatosis, have a higher risk of experience serious adverse events and death. A study published in the journal «Radiology».
One of the methods used by doctors to estimate the body fat of patients is the body mass index (BMI). Since BMI is calculated solely from the patient’s height and weight, it is not an accurate reflection of body composition, as patients with similar BMIs may have very different comorbidities and levels of health risk.
A more comprehensive reflection of body composition can be obtained from a computed tomography or one abdominal MRI, which can reveal various accumulations of fat. The medical community focuses mainly on visceral fat, which is fat that accumulates around the abdominal organs, and hepatic steatosis, which is a high amount of fat in the liver.
Another form of fat accumulation is myosteatosis, which occurs when fat accumulates in the muscles. Given that the miosteatosis Although it is often detected in patients who are already ill and undergoing medical imaging tests for another disease, little is known about its health risks in asymptomatic patients.
“To date, the medical imaging with CT or MRI remain the gold standard for evaluating myosteatosis,” says study co-author Maxime Nachit, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Research of UCLouvain de Bruselas (Belgica).
For this reason, Nachit and his colleagues tried to identify the association between myosteatosis and mortality risk, simultaneously studying visceral fat, hepatic steatosis, myopathy (loss of muscle mass), and obesity.
In the retrospective study, the researchers used a AI tool to extract body composition metrics from abdominal CT scans in asymptomatic adults who had undergone routine screening for colorectal cancer between 2004 and 2016. The incidences of major adverse events (such as heart attack, stroke, or aneurysm) and death were recorded during an average follow-up period of 8.8 years.
Of the 8,982 adults included in the study, a total of 507 died during the follow-up period. Myosteatosis was associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events and was detected in 55% of study participants who died. The absolute risk of 10-year mortality in individuals with myosteatosis was 15.5%, compared with obesity (7.6%), hepatic steatosis (8.5%), or myopathy (9.7%). .
Although the presence of other health factors, such as visceral fat and hepatic steatosis, were also associated with a higher risk of mortality, myosteatosis remained the highest.
“Interestingly, the relationship was independent of age or markers of obesity such as BMI,” Nachit noted. “In other words, this means that the accumulation of fat in the muscles is not explained simply by being older and/or having fat overload in other locations on the body.”
The mortality risk of patients with myosteatosis was comparable to the mortality risk associated with smoking or having type 2 diabetes.
The mortality risk of patients with miosteatosis was comparable to the risk of mortality associated with smoking or suffering from diabetes Type 2. Despite mounting evidence of risk factors associated with myosteatosis, it is a condition that continues to be overlooked by the medical community.
According to Nachit, future studies could help determine whether myosteatosis is solely a biomarker of poorer health or is causally associated with increased risk of death.
“We are seeing the beginning of ‘personalized medicine’, which aims to tailor medical treatment at the individual level based on a constellation of information such as genetics, medical history, physical characteristics, large-scale and complex molecular assessment, etc. “Nachit said. “Here we demonstrate that myosteatosis – a parameter retrievable from medical imaging routinely performed in hospitals – is a robust indicator of an individual’s risk of mortality in the relatively short term.”
#excess #fat #muscles