A study published in the journal Diabetes Care, led by researchers at Curtin University (Australia), examined the effect of so-called sarcopenic obesity: a profile that combines the body fat buildup typical of obesity with sarcopenia, meaning the loss of muscle mass and strength.
According to the results, people with this combination were more than three and a half times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than people with a body composition considered healthy. Specifically, nearly 15% of people with sarcopenic obesity developed type 2 diabetes within 10 years, compared with about 11% of people with obesity but no sarcopenia, and just 3% of those with neither obesity nor sarcopenia.
The study's lead author, Zhongyang Guan, said that assessing type 2 diabetes risk "should go beyond the scale," since muscle health, not just the amount of body fat, is also part of the puzzle when estimating each person's real risk.