Adults with CeD demonstrated lower muscle mass, strength, and physical performance than controls; in the 20-39 age range with Turkish reference values, low muscle strength occurred in a subset of patients and was not significantly associated with MUST-defined nutritional risk or current dietary/serological status.
Adults with celiac disease had lower skeletal muscle mass than healthy controls.
Handgrip strength was lower in adults with CeD than in controls.
Physical performance, measured as 4-m gait speed, was lower in adults with CeD.
Anthropometric measures were lower in the CeD group.
Medium/high nutritional risk by MUST was present in about a third of CeD patients and in no controls.
In a post hoc age-restricted analysis (20-39 years), low muscle strength was more frequent in CeD than in controls.
Within the age-restricted CeD subgroup, low muscle strength was not significantly associated with MUST risk category, though it was numerically more frequent with medium/high risk.
Low muscle strength did not differ significantly by current dietary/serological status in the age-restricted CeD subgroup.
The authors conclude that direct muscle assessment may provide complementary information beyond routine nutritional screening in adults with CeD.
This study compared 119 adults with celiac disease to 119 healthy adults. People with celiac disease had less skeletal muscle, weaker handgrip, and slower walking speed over 4 metres. They also had lower BMI and smaller arm and calf measurements. About one-third of the patients (34.5%) were flagged as being at medium or high risk of malnutrition on a standard screening tool, compared with none of the controls. In a smaller, post hoc analysis of people aged 20-39, where reference values for healthy Turkish adults exist, about 9% of patients with celiac disease (7 of 79) had clinically low grip strength, versus none of the 78 controls. Low strength was not clearly linked to the malnutrition screening result or to current diet or blood-test status, although there was a trend toward more low strength among those at higher nutritional risk (not statistically significant). This research suggests that standard nutritional screening may not fully capture muscle weakness in adults with celiac disease, and that directly measuring muscle strength might add useful information. The findings come from one setting, and the low-strength analysis was limited to younger adults and was exploratory, so they should be interpreted cautiously.
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Upload Your LabsDeniz Mitil, A. Yıldırım. (2026). Muscle Strength and Nutritional Status in Adults With Celiac Disease: A Prospective Case-Control Study.. Clinical Nutrition ESPEN. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnesp.2026.105199