Sarcopenia: The need to establish different cutting points of fat-free mass for the Chilean population

The AFFM of young Chileans is lower than that reported in Western countries but similar to Latin American data; therefore, the use of the traditional normative method would not be appropriate with -2 SD to establish cutoff points, and using -1 DS resulted in values that are higher than Baumgartner's. Stratification is advantageous because this method throws expected values of AFFM for each population; however, overdiagnosis of sarcopenia is a possibility and thus the method requires a representative sample. The percentage method is simple and showed the expected decrease of muscle mass with age, and also correlated well with handgrip strength in elderly women. Thus, this method represented our method of choice to detect sarcopenia.