# Quantitative assessment of early structural and functional changes in aging skeletal muscle

> **NIH NIH K99** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $102,973

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
Sarcopenia is a leading cause of death and disability for the aging population and creates a societal burden
resulting in $18 billion in annual costs in the United States alone. While new treatments have shown promise to
improve functional outcomes, they have been hampered by the lack of non-invasive biomarkers sensitive to the
early stages of the disease. In particular, non-invasive assessment of muscle atrophy is a long-recognized but
unmet need in the sarcopenia community, and we propose to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to address
this need.
This project develops a clinically feasible toolset to noninvasively image early atrophic changes in skeletal
muscle using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Our specific aims are (1) to develop new MRI techniques that
utilize a novel pulse sequence to quantify muscle cell size and changes thereof due to atrophy; (2) to validate
MR atrophy imaging with histological evaluation of muscle biopsies from young and older subjects, and correlate
with muscle strength; and (3) to apply MRI atrophy methods to study longitudinal changes in sarcopenic patients
and in pre-frail subjects, which are at high risk of developing sarcopenia.
The innovation of this work lies in the development of a novel imaging technique to quantify atrophy in muscle
tissue non-invasively. The outcome of this proposal is a validated and quantitative MRI tool to image muscle
quality, and its relationship to patient strength and functional status. The significance of this work is a robust
clinical MRI protocol to image early degenerative changes associated to sarcopenia that is transferrable to any
clinical site. The reproducible and robust tool will allow the sarcopenia imaging community to identify subject at
risk, and implement targeted and timely interventions that can stop or slow the progression of sarcopenia.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10189402
- **Project number:** 1K99AG071735-01
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Valentina Mazzoli
- **Activity code:** K99 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $102,973
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-06-01 → 2023-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10189402

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10189402, Quantitative assessment of early structural and functional changes in aging skeletal muscle (1K99AG071735-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10189402. Licensed CC0.

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