Association of Muscle Strength to Body Composition Measures using DXA, D 3 Cr, and BIA in Collegiate Athletes
Open accessPreprint — published as 10.1038/s41598-025-87918-4
Abstract
Background: Measurements of body composition are helpful indicators of health outcomes, but muscle strength has a greater correlation with disease risk and long-term health outcomes, particularly among older adults. Whole-body DXA scans uniquely parse out total and regional lean soft tissue (LST) and appendicular (ALST), primarily composed of skeletal muscle and often used to diagnose sarcopenia and frailty. An alternative approach measures the enrichment of deuterated Creatinine (D 3 Crn) in urine after ingesting a tracer dose of deuterated creatine (D 3 Cr) to determine creatine pool size and estimate whole-body muscle mass. The utility of D 3 Cr relationships between strength and body composition in young athletes has yet to be established. In this study, we investigated the association of muscle strength and body composition using multiple methods including DXA, D 3 Cr, and bioelectrical impedance (BIA), in a collegiate athletic population. Methods: The Da Kine Study enrolled 80 multi-sport collegiate athletes. Each subject consumed a 60 mg dose of D 3 Cr and completed whole-body DXA, BIA, and strength tests of the leg and trunk using an isokinetic dynamometer. The analysis was stratified by sex. Pearson’s correlations, forward stepwise linear regression and quartile p trend significance were used to show the associations of body composition measures to muscle strength. Results: The mean (SD) age of the 80 (40M/40F) athletes was 21.8 (4.2) years. Raw whole-body values had higher correlations with muscle strength in both sexes compared to the normalized values by height, body mass (BM), and BMI. DXA LST had the highest leg ( R 2 =0.36, 0.37) and trunk ( R 2 =0.53, 0.61) strength in both males and females. Trunk strength was more highly associated with body composition measures than leg strength in both sexes and all measurement techniques. One or more DXA LST measures (total, leg, and ALST) were consistently more highly associated with leg and trunk strengths for both sexes than BIA and D 3 Cr measures. Adjusting all body composition values by age, BMI, and BIA variables did not improve the associations. A significant p trend across quartiles was observed for DXA LST and ALST for all measures of strength in both sexes. Conclusion: Although statistical significance was not reached between devices, DXA body composition output variables, especially LST, showed the highest associations with both sexes’ leg and trunk muscle strength. Furthermore, without adjustment for demographic information or BIA variables, whole-body values show stronger associations with muscle strength. Future research should investigate the impact of muscle mass changes on LST and functional measures.
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A significant portion of the lean mass lost with GLP-1 RA treatment is muscle.
“prior studies have shown that a significant portion of this lean mass is muscle33–35”
From GDF8 and activin A blockade protects against GLP-1–induced muscle loss while enhancing fat loss in obese male mice and non-human primates (2025) · cites this paper as [35]
The Introduction discusses how lean soft tissue is measured and notes that it includes tissues other than skeletal muscle. Searches for GLP-1 treatment and treatment-related lean-mass loss found no passage assessing how much lost lean mass is muscle. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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“…RAs are powerful anti-obesity medications (AOMs), they do raise some serious concerns – most notably, up to 40% of the profound weight loss induced by these agents can be due to loss of lean mass 3 – 5 and prior studies have shown that a signi fi cant portion of this lean mass is muscle 33 – 35 .”
Arslan, O., Kurtoğlu, A., Çar, B., et al. (2026) · PeerJ · doi:10.7717/peerj.21526
- Authors
- Cataldi, D., Bennett, J. P., Quon, B. K., Leong, L., Kelly, T. L., Evans, W. J., Prado, C. M., Heymsfield, S. B., & Shepherd, J. A.
- Affiliations
- University of Hawaii Cancer Center (US)
- Hologic (United States) (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- University of Alberta (CA)
- Pennington Biomedical Research Center (US)
- Corresponding author
- Cataldi, Devon
- ORCID
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Publisher
- openRxiv
- Published
- 2023-05-18
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 5839-5839
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC11836400
- OpenAlex
- W4407718447
- Semantic Scholar
- 518ed464cda8d6ca9f16728f0d5d8cc49c862b9c
- Cited by
- 9
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 5
- FWCI
- 5.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- Locations
- Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- medRxiv (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Hologic (081018)
- National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (T32HL115505)
- National Cancer Institute (P01CA229100, P30CA071789)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Body Composition Measurement Techniques
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Orthopedics and Sports Medicine › Sports Performance and Training
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Cell Biology › Muscle metabolism and nutrition
- Keywords
- body composition, muscle strength, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, bioelectrical impedance analysis, lean tissue, muscle mass, collegiate athletes, trunk muscle strength, leg strength, sex differences, athletic performance
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Body Composition, Creatine, Female, Humans, Male, Absorptiometry, Photon, Electric Impedance, Muscle, Skeletal, Muscle Strength, Young Adult, Athletes
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