Introduction:

Sarcopenia is defined as a decrease in muscle mass associated with the reduction of performance and physical function. It is an indicator of adverse outcomes in elderly people. Its diagnosis requires body composition data of healthy young population to establish reference values of low muscle mass.

Objective:

To establish a provisional cut-off point for sarcopenia in the elderly population from Caldas based on the skeletal muscle composition data of young people using electric bioimpedance.

Materials and methods:

Body composition data from healthy young people (18 to 35 years old) were used to calculate the skeletal muscle mass index. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was applied to evaluate the normality of the data and then the average and standard deviation of muscle mass index were established for both men and women.

Results:

Based on these data, we established as low muscle mass a skeletal muscle mass index of two standard deviations below the mean of the muscular mass index in young people. The cut-off points were 6.42 kg/m2 and 8.39 kg/m2 for women and men, respectively.

Conclusion:

This is the first study that offers a description of skeletal muscle body composition in young Colombians and provides cut-off points for the diagnosis of sarcopenia in the elderly population from the Central-Andean region. The data gathered are similar to those proposed by some Asian authors, which shows that the population of this Colombian region has body composition characteristics similar to those from Asia.

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