Rather than conducting a costly CT or MR scan, researchers say they have developed a way to evaluate a patient's severity of heart failure that requires no imaging — and the key is in calculating their sarcopenia score.

The screening method was originally developed to diagnose sarcopenia, a disease that causes a loss of muscle mass and strength; but researchers have found that testing for sarcopenia can also test for heart failure severity. By determining a heart failure patient's sarcopenia score — which is derived from age, grip strength and calf circumference — physicians can quickly and inexpensively gain diagnostic insight.

The researchers, from Kumamoto University in Japan, performed a study on 119 patients who were hospitalized for evaluation and treatment of heart failure. The team then calculated sarcopenia scores prior to the patient leaving the hospital and compared the scores to laboratory data, echocardiography, and the patient’s diagnosis over 750 days. They discovered that patients with a higher sarcopenia score were at a higher risk of heart failure.
In the past, tests were often difficult to perform since muscle mass measurements were taken with CT or MR examinations. These types of analyses were expensive, and not all medical institutions carried such large-scale equipment. The examination of sarcopenia in daily clinical practice was therefore often difficult.

“I hope this test can predict future onset of heart failure,” Yasuhiro Izumiya, corresponding author of the paper, told HCB News, and to address this topic, the team plans further investigation by enrolling non-heart failure patients.

Research is still unclear as to why the worsening of cancer or heart disease is linked with sarcopenia, according to the announcement, but it is thought that skeletal muscle, whose main function is movement, secretes a substance that improves the condition of remote organs. When the skeletal muscle mass decreases, the substance also decreases.

Cardiology Homepage