Sarcopenia among bipolar disorder patients

Objective: Sarcopenia (SP) is a syndrome defined as the generalized and progressive loss of muscle mass and strength that may cause fall, fractures, disability, and death. Pre-SP is defined as the loss of the muscle mass, but SP additionally requiring the loss of muscle strength and/or performance. If three components (mass, strength, performance) of SP coexist, the condition called as severe SP. Endocrine causes, neurodegenerative diseases, nutritional disorders, cachexia, physical inactivity, and senility are the possible etiologic factors in SP. Oxidative stress may be a possible etiologic factor in SP as well. SP is a comorbid syndrome that seen in chronic illnesses. If these two are considered together, one may also think that SP might be seen in bipolar disorder (BD) too since it is a chronic disorder and associated with oxidative stress. In recent years senile depressive male patients showed that they had increased prevalence of SP. BD patients’ time that passed with illness is mostly in depression. We aimed to investigate SP prevalence in BD patients.

Methods: We recruited 100 consecutive BD patients that are registered in Mood Disorders Unit of Gaziantep University. According to the study criteria, six patients were excluded. As a result, the study data was constituted from 94 patients. The blood tests were taken from patients to exclude the possible confounding factor related with SP. Socio-demographic variable form was filled. Every patient had physical mass, strength, and performance tests in order to diagnose SP, based on the criteria of European Consensus.

Results: Mean age of the patients was 37.13±10.77 years (18-68). Among the participants 58 (61.7% were female, and 36 (38.3%) were male. Pre-SP was 10.6% (n=10), SP was 6.4% (n=6), and severe SP was 2.1% (n=2). SP diagnosed patients had statistically significantly more depressive and total number of episodes than no-SP patients (0.025, 0.016 respectively). Although it was marginally significant, another difference has been observed thatSP patients had more mean number of episodes per year (p=0.058).

Conclusions: This is the first study that investigated SP in BD patients. SP was diagnosed more frequent than normal population in BD patients. BD was defined as a chronic and degenerative disorder. The degeneration was shown in white and gray matter in the brain. The results of the study may add a new aspect of degeneration that seen in BD is