La futura prevalenza della sarcopenia in Europa: Una richiesta d’azione per la sanità pubblica

O. Ethgen, C. Beaudart, F. Buckinx, O. Bruyère, J.Y. Reginster

Calcif Tissue Int. 2017;100(3):229-234

Sarcopenia is a major public health issue. To convince health policy makers of the emergency to invest in the sarcopenia field, it is of critical importance to produce reliable figures of the expected burden of sarcopenia in the coming years. Age- and gender-specific population projections were retrieved until 2045 from the Eurostat online database (28 European countries). Age- and gender-specific prevalences of sarcopenia were interpolated from a study that compared prevalence estimates according to the different diagnostic cutoffs of the EWGSOP proposed definition. The reported prevalence estimates were interpolated between 65 and 100 years. Interpolated age- and gender-specific estimates of sarcopenia prevalence were then applied to population projections until 2045. Using the definition providing the lowest prevalence estimates, the number of individuals with sarcopenia would rise in Europe from 10,869,527 in 2016 to 18,735,173 in 2045 (a 72.4% increase). This corresponds to an overall prevalence of sarcopenia in the elderly rising from 11.1% in 2016 to 12.9% in 2045. With the definition providing the highest prevalence estimates, the number of individuals with sarcopenia would rise from 19,740,527 in 2016 to 32,338,990 in 2045 (a 63.8% increase), corresponding to overall prevalence rates in the elderly of 20.2% and 22.3% for 2016 and 2045, respectively. We showed that the number of sarcopenic patients will dramatically increase in the next 30 years, making consequences of muscle wasting a major public health issue.

Comment: The attention focused on sarcopenia will also induce research and development toward an improvement of the currently available diagnostic tools, allowing for a wide availability of more accurate and affordable equipments. Several potential promising pharmacological interventions are under development to improve physical performance in elderly subjects with frailty or sarcopenia the likelihood that these interventions will fully revert the process of loss of muscle mass, strength or performance is very low, which means that even if widely available in a soon future, these therapeutic option will not impact on the prevalence of the disease.