Sarcopenia drives falls, disability, poor surgical outcomes and mortality, and it has been substantially under-quantified in India. This systematic review searched four databases to December 2025, screening 5,486 records and including 44 studies across community and hospital-based populations.
Pooled prevalence was 36.3% for probable sarcopenia (18 studies), 35.4% for confirmed (38 studies) and 9.9% for severe (11 studies). More than one in three older adults met criteria for confirmed sarcopenia — a figure high enough to change how routinely it should be looked for.
The methodological finding matters as much as the number. Only 54.5% of studies used consensus definitions such as the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia or European criteria; the rest used heterogeneous, non-uniform operational definitions. That inconsistency is why the confidence intervals are wide and why the burden has been hard to establish, and it has a direct clinical parallel: a patient assessed as sarcopenic in one clinic may not be in another. The practical response is to adopt one consensus definition — AWGS is the appropriate regional choice — and apply it consistently, so that assessments made in different settings mean the same thing.
- Confirmed sarcopenia 35.4%; probable 36.3%; severe 9.9%
- 44 studies, community and hospital populations across India
- Only 54.5% used consensus criteria; the rest used ad hoc definitions
- Adopt one definition — AWGS regionally — and apply it consistently
The statistics, in plain English
The wide interval on probable sarcopenia, 26% to 48%, reflects genuine disagreement between studies rather than small samples, and that disagreement is largely definitional: studies using different criteria are counting different people. Note that probable and confirmed prevalence are almost identical here, at 36.3% and 35.4%, which is unusual — probable sarcopenia normally captures a larger group — and is itself a sign of inconsistent application of the staging criteria.
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