Current Obesity Reports · 8 authors, 5 centres
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This umbrella review of four systematic reviews with meta-analyses of RCTs assessed nutrition and exercise interventions in persons with sarcopenic obesity. Resistance training was found to improve gait speed and lower leg strength, but overall certainty of evidence ranged from moderate to very low due to small numbers of primary studies.
This umbrella review identified four systematic reviews of RCTs (each including between 30 and 225 participants per outcome) examining nutrition, exercise, and combined interventions for sarcopenic obesity. Ten interventions were categorised as exercise (resistance training, aerobic training, WB-EMS, mixed training), nutrition (protein supplementation, hypocaloric diet with high protein), or combined approaches. Resistance training was the most frequently studied and improved gait speed by 0.14 to 0.17 m/s and lower leg strength by 9.97 kg, though no intervention achieved a clinically relevant improvement above 0.5 m/s. Combined exercise-nutrition interventions and protein supplementation alone showed no significant effects on most measured outcomes; protein supplementation combined with a hypocaloric diet improved only total body fat mass. Methodological quality of included reviews ranged from moderate to critically low (AMSTAR 2), and certainty of evidence ranged from moderate to very low (GRADE). No adverse events were reported in any included review. The authors note that the small number of primary studies limits confidence in the findings and call for higher-quality trials.
