Increased muscle echo intensity effectively identifies insulin resistance and impaired insulin sensitivity
By Elana Gotkine HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, June 30, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Muscle ultrasound can detect insulin resistance and lower muscle mass, according to a study published online June 12 in the Journal of Ultrasound Medicine.
Steven B. Soliman, D.O., from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues examined the potential use of noninvasive muscle ultrasound for detecting early-developing insulin resistance and lower muscle mass in a study involving 20 subjects with obesity, without type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, and five healthy lean controls. Participants underwent ultrasound of their deltoid and vastus lateralis muscles. Three hundred ultrasound images were analyzed independently by two trained research assistants, measuring muscle echo intensity (MEI). Peripheral insulin sensitivity was assessed in the obesity cohort; body composition was also examined and sarcopenia indices were calculated.
The researchers found that vastus lateralis and deltoid MEI were significantly higher in the obesity cohort, with increased MEI effectively identifying insulin resistance and impaired insulin sensitivity. Excellent interobserver agreement was seen for both the deltoid and vastus lateralis muscles (95 percent confidence interval of intraclass correlation coefficient, 0.96 to 0.997 and 0.986 to 0.999, respectively). There was a negative correlation seen for MEI with muscle mass, as indicated by sarcopenia indices, and no positive correlation seen with body mass index or body weight.
“A medical assistant or clinician with little to no training could easily use this device on a patient’s upper arm or thigh, as routinely as checking weight or blood pressure, and potentially flag patients as ‘high risk’ or ‘low risk’ for further testing,” Soliman said in a statement.
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