The authors reply: Letter on: “ Sarcopenia and its association with falls and fracturesin older adults: A systematic review andmeta‐analysis” by Zhang et al.

Abstract

Thank you for the comments to our recent article "Sarcopenia and its association with falls and fractures in older adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis". 1 Firstly, as mentioned in our article, studies were excluded from the meta-analysis if an odds ratio (OR) could not be calculated because of insufficient data, or confidence intervals were not presented. Therefore, we were not able to include the studies of Cawthon, 2 Schaap, 3 and Henwood, 4 as hazard ratios 2,3 or risk ratios 4 were reported. These measures are not interchangeable with ORs 5,6 but can be converted if information about the baseline risk is available. 7 We agree that the above-mentioned studies are valuable; therefore, we contacted the authors to obtain the data needed to compute ORs. Two authors of the three studies responded, which allowed us to include those studies in the meta-analysis. 2,3 Both were prospective studies examining the association between sarcopenia with falls and fractures. ORs reported in our original article 1 did not change significantly after inclusion Figure 1 Forest plot of odds ratio for falls in sarcopenic individuals vs. non-sarcopenic individuals