Powerpenia and Musculoskeletal Aging: Detecting Meaningful Loss of Muscle Power Across the Lifespan

Muscle power—the ability to generate force quickly—is essential for everyday function. It supports tasks such as rising from a chair, climbing stairs, regaining balance after a trip, and crossing a street safely. Importantly, muscle power often declines earlier and more steeply than muscle mass or maximal strength, making it a promising marker of emerging functional limitation. This age-related reduction in power, increasingly described as powerpenia, may help explain why some individuals experience rapid losses in mobility and independence even when traditional indicators of sarcopenia appear only mildly affected.Despite rising interest, the field still lacks shared standards for how to define powerpenia, how to measure muscle power consistently across settings, and how to identify when a decline becomes clinically meaningful rather than part of normal aging. Differences in testing approaches, device availability, and population characteristics also limit comparison across studies and slow translation into clinical practice.This Research Topic will showcase advances that improve the detection, interpretation, and clinical relevance of muscle power across the lifespan. We welcome studies that develop and validate assessment approaches ranging from laboratory-based methods to feasible field tests, and that establish normative reference values across age, sex, and diverse populations. A central aim is to clarify what constitutes “meaningful loss,” including thresholds linked to real-world outcomes and methods to detect important within-person change over time. Contributions that connect muscle power measures to falls, frailty, disability, cardiometabolic health, hospitalization, and mortality are particularly encouraged, as are studies that test whether muscle power improves risk prediction beyond muscle mass and strength.The Topic will also highlight mechanisms that drive power loss, including neuromuscular changes, muscle architecture, tendon properties, metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, and the effects of inactivity and chronic disease. Interventional work is welcome, especially trials and implementation studies evaluating resistance training, high-velocity/power training, rehabilitation strategies, and multimodal programs designed to preserve or restore power and translate gains into better function. Emerging digital and wearable approaches that enable scalable or remote assessment of power-related metrics are also of strong interest.By bringing together methodological, mechanistic, longitudinal, and interventional evidence, this Research Topic aims to accelerate consensus and practical solutions for identifying and addressing meaningful muscle power loss—supporting healthier musculoskeletal aging across the lifespan. Topic editors: Fátima Baptista Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77725/powerpenia-and-musculoskeletal-aging-detecting-meaningful-loss-of-muscle-power-across-the-lifespan