How Much Sarcopenia Do You Have?
01 Mar 2004
"What in the devil is Sarcopenia?" I wondered. But this ignorance didn’t bother my psyche. After all, I knew I wasn’t a whiz kid in Latin. So I asked my literate wife who loved Latin what it meant. She just shook her head and replied, "Dummy, it’s not Latin. It’s Greek." This gaffe did scar my psyche a bit. But it didn’t stop me from learning more about this common condition. And why even joggers are not immune to developing sarcopenia.
A report from Tufts University claims we must all start thinking about sarcopenia. It states that everyone is concerned about heart attack, cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease as we age. But the one disease that robs many elderly people of their independence is sarcopenia, a "creeping frailty" due to loss of muscle mass.
Visit any nursing home and you will see examples of sarcopenia. Many elderly are there, not because of a specific disease, but because they are too weak from muscle loss to care for themselves.
Dr Irwin Rosenberg, Dean of the School of Nutrition at Tufts, reports that muscles, like bones, get weaker as we age. He says that sarcopenia begins around age 45 and increases at the rate of one per cent a year. It means that by age 65 sedentary people have lost half of their muscle mass. And you can’t lose muscle mass without losing muscle strength.
Women are at greater risk because they start off in life with one third less muscle mass than men. Since they live longer there’s more time to lose muscle strength. This is why there are more women in nursing homes than men.
So what can you do to decrease the risk of ending your days in a wheelchair? It’s important not to get caught in a vicious cycle. As we age there’s a tendency to shy away from strenuous tasks that cause discomfort. This sets the stage for sarcopenia.
It’s been known for decades that weightlifting and working on resistance machines increases muscle mass and strength in young people. But when this approach was tried on older people their muscles didn’t get larger.
The reason for the poor results was the initial fear that pushing older people too hard would be unwise. Later, when larger weights were used those between the ages of 60 to 72 doubled their leg strength in 12 weeks of training. Some frail 90 year olds tossed away their canes after an 8 weeks of exercise.
Dr. William Evans at the University of Arkansas says that high intensity weight-lifting causes microscopic tears in the muscle. The muscles then rebuild protein and the muscle cells become stronger.
Dr. Evans cites a study in Finland in which men in their late 60s who had lifted weights for years had a muscle mass similar to non-athletes in their 20s. But joggers were not protected from sarcopenia as the stress produced by this sport can’t compete with lifting weights.
There are other benefits to preserving muscle mass. During an illness the body withdraws protein from muscles to aid in healing and producing antibodies to fight infection. If’ significant sarcopenia is present there’s less ammunition to fight illness.
The Tufts report suggests that a lack of protein may also play a role in developing sarcopenia. Researchers showed that older women who consumed low levels of protein lost muscle mass in just 8 weeks. This did not occur in women on an adequate protein diet.
Day after day we need protein for a variety of functions. And if there’s insufficient dietary protein the body deprives muscle to obtain amino acids, the building blocks of protein.
Dr. Carmen Castaneda-Sceppa, head of the Sarcopenia Laboratory at Tufts, says that a 150 pound person needs 68 grams of protein daily. But that one in three over age 60 fails to eat this amount.
3 ounces (oz) of steak, chicken or fish contain 21 grams (gm) of protein and
a baked potato with skin 5 gm.
Slightly depressed by my ignorance of Greek I subsequently ordered a 6 oz steak and a glass of wine at my favourite restaurant. And it didn’t bother me at all that 5 oz of red wine only contains 0.3 gm of protein. In fact, I’ll order another.
