Non-invasive optical brain imaging of sarcopenia disease: preliminary results

Abstract

Objective: Sarcopenia is an age-related disease characterized by skeletal muscle mass and function deterioration. Recent studies indicate that sarcopenia can be associated with an increase in the likelihood of cognitive impairment and in addition to cognitive functioning, muscle functions might be a critical factor to understand the sarcopenia compared to muscle mass. To understand these functions, we utilized Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to reveal neurological markers of sarcopenia by observing both motor functions of sarcopenia patients and healthy controls. Methods: In this study, we recorded fNIRS data from 32 female participants (20 control, 12 sarcopenic) during the Hand-Grip paradigm. Optodes were positioned over Primary Motor Cortex (BA 4), Premotor and Supplementary Motor Cortex (BA 6) and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (BA 46 & BA 9). After preprocessing, mean oxy-hemoglobin concentration change (ΔHbO2) was used as independent variable for two-way repeated measures ANOVA to analyze the group (sarcopenic, healthy controls),condition (for hand grip, grip & rest) main effect and their interactions. Results: None of the regions showed significant group main effect (p>0.05). All of the regions showed significant condition main effect (p<0.05). Post hoc results revealed that grip condition is greater than rest condition. Also, there was no significant interaction between group and condition (p>0.05). Conclusion: As expected, there was a significant difference between rest and grip conditions. Moreover, we have seen that the control group showed greater response during grip condition. However, we did not find any significant difference between participants groups and no interactions between groups and conditions. This result is similar to the result of the study done by Trost et. al. (2023) which is the only task-based neuroimaging study carried out on sarcopenia patients, where they did not find any differences between participant groups in single task experiments. This study is supported by TUBITAK within the scope of ARDEB 1001 with the title “Identification of Neuro-Cognitive Markers of Sarcopenia Disease by Using Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy and Artificial Intelligence Approaches” and project number 122E210.