Impact of sarcopenia on mortality risk and sustained peak expiratory flow changes in an asthmatic population: A 7-year longitudinal cohort study.

AIM: Sarcopenia causes death in the general population, but its relationship with asthma-specific populations remains unknown. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between sarcopenia and mortality risk, as well as lung function in asthmatic population.

METHODS

All participants in this study were drawn from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, which primarily involved longitudinal data for the period 2011-2018. All participants were asthmatic and divided into sarcopenia and non-sarcopenia groups. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to calculate the cumulative mortality rate in each group. Cox proportional hazards and linear mixed models were used to assess the effect of sarcopenia on mortality risk and peak expiratory flow in an asthmatic population.

RESULTS

A total of 606 participants were included in the baseline analysis, of which 32.5% had sarcopenia. During the 7-year follow-up period, the cumulative mortality rates were 29.9% (59/197) and 13.7% (56/409) in the sarcopenic and non-sarcopenic groups, respectively. Survival analysis showed that the asthmatic population in the sarcopenia group showed a higher risk of death than the non-sarcopenia group (HR 2.49, 95% CI 1.74-3.57, P < 0.001). In the subgroup analyses, there was an interaction between the effects of cardiovascular disease and sarcopenia on the mortality risk of asthma. Linear mixed modeling results showed that asthmatics with sarcopenia had lower lung function (P < 0.001), and that this effect did not change over time.

CONCLUSIONS

The results showed a significant association between sarcopenia and higher mortality events and lower lung function in the asthmatic population. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2025; 25: 1178-1184.