Fat percentage cutoff values to define obesity and prevalence of sarcopenic obesity in community-dwelling older adults in Turkey.

Purpose: Sarcopenic-obesity (SO) is associated with low-functional-status and mortality. Few studies evaluated the definition and prevalence of SO. We aimed to investigate the fat-percentage cut-off values for obesity and prevalences of obesity, SO in community-dwelling older adults in Turkey.

Methods: Body-composition was measured using bioimpedance-analysis. Sarcopenia was defined by European-Working-Group-on-Sarcopenia-in-Older-People criteria. Obesity was defined by two different methods, a fat-percentile above 60th percentile (Zoico-method) or a BMI of ≥30 kg/m (WHO-definition).

Results: We enrolled 992 subjects (308 men, 684 women). Body fat-percentage thresholds for obesity were 27.3% for men and 40.7% for women according to Zoico-method. The rates of obesity were about 40% in both genders by Zoico-method; 29.2% versus 53.7% for men and women by WHO definition. Prevalences-of-sarcopenia was 3.1% versus 0.4%; SO was 0.3% versus 0.1% when obesity was assessed with Zoico-method in men and women, respectively. No case of SO was defined when obesity was assessed using WHO-definition.

Conclusion: The threshold for obesity definition according to Zoico-method was similar to other European-populations. While obesity-prevalences were considerably high, SO prevalences were low but comparable to other populations. This low-prevalence seems to be due to underestimation of sarcopenia in obese subjects when skeletal-muscle-mass was adjusted by height to recognize low-muscle-mass.