The following is a summary of “Muscle ultrasound to diagnose sarcopenia in chronic kidney disease: a systematic review and bayesian bivariate meta-analysis,” published in the January 2024 issue of Nephrology by Yang et al.
Ultrasound steps onto the stage for assessing muscle mass in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients, a growing population wrestling with sarcopenia’s grip globally. Researchers conducted a retrospective study on muscle ultrasound, scrutinizing its accuracy in diagnosing sarcopenia among individuals with CKD.
They searched Cochrane Library, PubMed, and Embase (June 2023), focusing on ultrasound diagnosis of sarcopenia in CKD patients. The Quality Assessment Tool for Diagnosis Accuracy Studies (QUADAS-2) was employed by two independent investigators. Valuable information was extracted from eligible studies, and using a Bayesian bivariate model, sensitivity and specificity values were combined along with summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curves.
The results showed 5 articles, with 428 participants at various stages of CKD. Three studies used the rectus femoris’s cross-sectional area (CSA) for diagnosis. In contrast, two others used muscle thickness (MT) and shear wave elastography (SWE) separately from the same muscle. Either CSA or SWE demonstrated a pooled sensitivity of 0.95 (95% credible interval [CrI], 0.80, 1.00), with specificity at 0.73 (95% CrI, 0.55, 0.88) for sarcopenia diagnosis in CKD patients.
Investigators concluded that CKD ultrasounds outperformed classic methods in sarcopenia detection, paving the way for rapid screening with refined cut-offs.
Source: bmcnephrol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12882-023-03445-2’