It has been known for a long time that profound changes in body composition are associated with growing older; but only relatively recently we have focused on the importance of the loss of muscle mass.

The first document that specifically introduces the concept of sarcopenia was published in 1993 (Evans WJ, Campbell WW.J Nutr. 1993;123:465-8. ) that defines it as the age-related loss in skeletal muscle mass, which results in decreased strength and aerobic capacity and thus functional capacity.

Sarcopenia is also closely linked to age-related problems such as osteoporosis, the decrease in basal metabolic rate and increased body fat content.

Through diet, physical exercise and training, especially resistance training, it may be possible to prevent sarcopenia and the remarkable array of associated pathologies, such as type II diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis and obesity.

These beneficial effects are the specific reason why prevention, early diagnosis and treatment have become topics of increasing interest in scientific literature.

Follow this link to real time updates to scientific articles on the subject of sarcopenia. The graph to the right indicates the number of articles produced per year and shows how the scientific interest in this topic is constantly increasing.

You will find the reviews of scientific literature here.

All the links in this section are taken from PubMed. PubMed is a free search engine that accesses primarily the MEDLINE database of biomedical scientific literature from 1949 to date. Its first online version was in January 1996. It is produced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The database is usually searched via Entrez, the search engine developed by the NCBI for the identification of biological, chemical and medical information. (source Wikipedia).