The review article discusses age-related obesity, sarcopenia with obesity, sarcopenia without obesity in the elderly and old people. According to the results of large epidemiological studies, it is known that sarcopenia is more often observed in the elderly and old people, but can develop in young people and even in children with severe diseases, which is due to the development of chronic inflammatory, autoimmune, endocrine and oncological diseases, impaired motor activity, lack of balanced nutrition, i. e. the resulting sarcopenia can be both a consequence and a cause of various diseases. The main indicator of probable sarcopenia is reduced muscle strength measured by a dynamometer. Currently, a distinction is made between primary sarcopenia, which developed as a result of age-related changes, without other causes, and secondary sarcopenia, which occurs against the background of chronic diseases, pathological conditions. A distinction is made between acute and chronic sarcopenia, where acute sarcopenia lasts less than 6 months and is usually associated with an acute illness or injury; chronic sarcopenia lasts 6 months or more and is caused by chronic progressive diseases. It is well known that as a person ages, the amount of adipose tissue in the body increases with a gradual loss of muscle mass. Age-related accumulation of adipose tissue in the elderly and old people can be combined with sarcopenia, and then sarcopenic obesity develops, that is, a combination of age-related decrease in muscle mass with an increase in the amount of adipose tissue. Sarcopenic obesity is associated with inflammation, an increased risk of fractures and is observed in patients with visceral obesity, but older people with excess accumulation of subcutaneous fat have a lower mortality rate, which corresponds to the modern concept of the “obesity paradox”. Currently, there are more than 500 articles in the literature with conflicting results on the effect of obesity on sarcopenia.
Khoroshinina et al. (Sun,) studied this question.