How healthy is your core? Exploring new ways to measure muscle health
Towards a clearer picture of the muscles that support your spine.
Appearances may not tell the whole story of the muscles at your core.
Our new study shows the exciting potential of MRI to provide meaningful biomarkers for core muscle health.
Modern medicine depends on measurement. Without blood pressure or heart rate, clinicians would struggle to understand cardiovascular health. Muscle health is harder to define. We’re often left estimating it indirectly — through appearance, strength tests or simple measurements that reveal little about individual muscles themselves.
Our new study explores whether quantitative MRI can help change that. Using advanced MRI analysis, we compared the spinal muscles of healthy active and inactive adults, looking not just at muscle size but at measurable differences in muscle quality and composition.
MRI already allows researchers to see muscles in detail. Quantitative MRI goes further — turning images into measurements that can be tracked, compared and studied over time.
Two people may look similar externally while having very different muscle condition internally. Our study used quantitative MRI to examine specific spinal muscles individually, helping build a more detailed picture of how activity levels may influence muscle health.
The study analysed MRI scans from healthy adults with different activity levels, focusing on measurable characteristics within the muscles themselves — including muscle composition and fat content.
This points towards an important shift in musculoskeletal medicine: the development of imaging biomarkers for core muscle health.
The implications extend far beyond sport. Better ways to measure muscle health could eventually improve how clinicians understand ageing, inactivity, rehabilitation and long-term spinal health.
