Effects of muscle composition and architecture on specific strength in obese older women.

What is the central question of this study? Do obesity-specific factors affect skeletal muscle performance in older individuals? What is the main finding and its importance? Older obese women have a larger quadriceps femoris size but develop lower tension per unit of skeletal muscle than their normal-weight counterparts. Muscle impairment and excess body mass are very common among older people. Given that the effect of obesity on strength production has scarcely been studied in older individuals, we analysed functional and structural characteristics of quadriceps femoris (QF) in obese (OB) and normal-weight (NW) older women with comparable habitual physical activity.

Automatic muscle and fat segmentation in the thigh from T1-Weighted MRI.

Purpose: To introduce and validate an automatic segmentation method for the discrimination of skeletal muscle (SM), and adipose tissue (AT) components (subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] and intermuscular adipose tissue [IMAT]) from T1-weighted (T1 -W) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images of the thigh.

Materials And Methods: Eighteen subjects underwent an MRI examination on a 1.5T Philips Achieva scanner.