The prevalence of sarcopenia varies depending on environments and populations of older people. What is more, in separate studies different diagnostic criteria are used. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of sarcopenia in an examined sample of older patients and to verify whether bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIVA) may be used as an auxiliary method in diagnosing of sarcopenia among hospitalized older patients.

The European Working Group of Sarcopenia in Older People (EWGSOP) algorithm using two different muscle mass criteria was applied and among misclassified subjects we used BIVA parameters to verify the prevalence of sarcopenia.

The prevalence of sarcopenia ranged between 60.7% and 79.8% according to the two suggested different muscle mass cutpoints. Seventeen subjects mismatched according to used muscle mass cutpoints were further analyzed individually on the basis of their mean BIVA parameters. The location of the confidence ellipse of misclassified women overlapped with the women group diagnosed as “nonsarcopenic”, while sarcopenic group was statistically different.

BIVA is a valuable tool that may be used as an auxiliary method to verify the prevalence of sarcopenia among older women. Mismatched women were characterized with BIVA parameters similar to that of nonsarcopenic women and clearly different from BIVA parameters of their sarcopenic peers. Due to the small number of nonsarcopenic men in our sample further studies are required to verify if this method may also be an additional assessment tool for men.