Sarcopenia and hospitalisation costs in older adults: a cross‐sectional study

Abstract

Sarcopenia and low muscle strength at hospital admission were independently associated with increased hospital costs.

Use of hand grip strength in nutrition risk screening of older patients admitted to general surgical wards

“…This further complicates the association between reduced HGS and malnutrition in an older population. Whether indicative of nutritional status or sarcopenia, low HGS has been shown to be a predictor of increased length of stay, postoperative complications and requirement for assistance at admission and at 6 months post‐discharge . It may therefore be useful in screening patients who would most benefit from multidisciplinary intervention and early discharge planning.…”

The health economics burden of sarcopenia: a systematic review

“…After the process of selection based on abstract and title and after on the full-text article review ( Fig. 1), we finally included 14 studies assessing the difference in health care costs between individuals with or without sarcopenia [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Sixteen studies were rejected because of duplicate (n = 2) [11,20], wrong outcomes (n = 13) [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] or wrong exposure factor (n = 1) [38].…”

“…A complete presentation of the characteristics and design of the 14 included studies [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] is accessible in Table 3. All studies, specifically regarding their analysis of sarcopenia-related costs, followed a cross-sectional design and was comprised of 50 to 1593 participants.…”

“…The type of population studied differed a little between studies : most were carried out on hospitalized individuals (10 studies out of 14, 71%), after surgery (8 studies out of 14, 57%) or not, but two studies [17,19] related to healthy community-dwelling older adults and one to patients living in the community, but presenting a disease (i.e., cirrhosis) [22]. Regarding diagnosis of sarcopenia, only half of the included studies reported using a definition of the disease recommended by scientific societies [10,12,[17][18][19]21,23].…”

“…The way to diagnose sarcopenia was indeed very heterogeneous, the diagnostic thresholds being also arbitrarily placed for the majority of the included studies. For instance, 11 studies out of 14 [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]20,22,23] applied diagnostic thresholds according to the results intrinsic to their own study and population (i.e., lowest tertile or quartile) and not based on data validated and recognized in the scientific literature, as used by the three other studies [10,19,21]. However, when applicable, the cut-offs used to measure muscle strength and physical performance were all based on more robust scientific evidence.…”