J Menopausal Med.  2021 Dec;27(3):s4.

Effects of sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity on joint pain and degenerative osteoarthritis in postmenopausal women

• Lee JE
• Kim HI
• Ahn SH
• Kim Y
• Seo SK

Abstract

Purpose
This study aimed to identify the prevalence of sarcopenia, obesity, and sarcopenic obesity and their association to radiographic knee osteoarthritis (OA) and knee pain in Korean menopausal women.
Methods
This study cross-sectional study utilized the data obtained from Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (KNHANES) 2009-2011 which included 4,362 menopausal women. The participants were categorized based on their body composition and the prevalence of radiographic knee OA and knee pain were calculated. The effect of hormone therapy (HT) was analyzed as subcohort analysis.
Results
The prevalence of radiographic knee OA, knee pain, and both radiographic knee OA and knee pain were all highest in sarcopenic obese group and lowest in non-sarcopenic non-obese group. Among the non-sarcopenic people, the obese people showed higher ratio of only radiographic knee OA (57.64% vs. 41.54%, p ＜ 0.001). When sarcopenic, the coexistence of obesity presented significantly higher ratio of radiographic knee OA, knee pain, and both radiographic knee OA and knee pain compared to sarcopenic without obesity (61.49% vs. 41.82%, 39.11% vs. 27.61%, 32.04 vs. 17.60%, all p ＜ 0.001). Regarding the use of HT for longer than 1 year was not associated with statistically different ratio of neither radiographic knee OA nor knee pain.
Conclusion
The obesity in terms of sarcopenia have greater effect on knee OA compared to the obesity without sarcopenia and HT use of longer than 1 year is not associated with the prevalence of knee OA. Therefore, more preventive effort to knee OA should be focused on reducing body fat and increasing muscle in the postmenopausal women.