Leveraging Multiomic Signatures to Predict Body Composition

Obesity, sarcopenia, malnutrition, and cachexia all include assessment of body composition in their respective clinical guidelines, although patient evaluations frequently require hardware that may not be available. Body mass index often fills this void, but its accuracy as a body composition phenotyping method is limited. Recent advances suggest a new option for assessing patient body composition: omics-derived circulating blood biomarkers applied in combination with demographic information or alone to estimate the mass or volume of clinically relevant body components. The origin of this movement has its roots, among other factors, in 2 longstanding observations: that serum concentrations of the metabolite creatinine are associated with total body skeletal muscle mass and that serum concentrations of the protein leptin are associated with total body adipose tissue mass. The first section of this review demonstrates how body composition prediction models can be developed that exploit these kinds of observations by adding serum metabolite and protein measurements to conventional equations designed to estimate components that include demographic covariates such as weight, height, sex, and body circumferences. The second section of this review then broadens the number of potential circulating blood metabolites and proteins examined by reviewing advances in omics technology that offer the potential to improve conventional body composition prediction models that include demographic data or to create models solely based on blood biomarker measurements. The final section of the review presents a perspective on this rapidly advancing area of human body composition assessment.