Sarcopenia or respiratory muscle wasting and dysfunction in patients with severe COVID-19 was strongly associated with increased in-patient mortality, reveals the latest study at Brooke Army Medical Center, Texas, and presented at the Society of Critical Care Medicine Congress. The state of generalised muscle wasting and dysfunction has been demonstrated to be associated with poor outcomes across various patient populations, according to the lead researcher Dr Connor J. Wakefield, a resident physician from the Department of Internal Medicine at the Brooke Army Medical Center. The retrospective single-center cohort study by Dr Wakefield and colleagues included 99 adults admitted to the ICU with confirmed COVID-19 from March to December 2020.