ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Med.
Sec. Geriatric Medicine
Pectoral muscle cross-sectional area correlates with bone mineral density in postmenopausal women
Min Xue 1
Xiao-hui You 2
Xiongyi Wang 1
Youjia Xu 1
1. The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China
2. The Affiliated Suzhou Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Suzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract
Objective: To evaluate the correlation between pectoralis muscle and bone mineral density (BMD) in postmenopausal women with estrogen deficiency. Furthermore, the degree of bone loss can be initially assessed by chest muscle area. Methods: This is a retrospective study. 500 subjects were included in this study from August 2023 to August 2024. The participants were classified into normal, osteopenia, and osteoporosis groups. We analyzed the correlation between the age, BMI, PMA and BMD. The correlation between PMA and BMD was tested by multiple linear regression, after correction for age and BMI. Results: A total of 338 subjects were finally included in the study after exclusion criteria. There was good agreement between the two measurement workers (ICC = 0.980, p < 0.05). Age, BMI and PMA were strongly correlated with BMD. PMA was positively correlated with lowest BMD (r=0.448). Multiple linear regression showed no multicollinearity between age, BMI and PMA. The formula was: Lowest BMD = 0.858 -0.005*age + 0.006*BMI + 0.005*PMA. Conclusions: Decreased muscle mass increases the risk of osteoporosis prevalence. Simple measurements from routine chest CT can provide information about BMD and offer a way to evaluate osteoporosis.
Summary
Keywords
Bone Mineral Density (BMD), Chest computed tomography (CT), Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), Osteoporosis (OP), pectoral muscle area (PMA)
Received
05 January 2026
Accepted
17 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Xue, You, Wang and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Youjia Xu
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.