Patients with critical illness and typically treated in intensive care units (ICU). During a stay on the ICU, patients lose a large amount of muscle mass and patients struggle to recover from this loss. The Exercise Biologists Tobias Märkl and Prof Dr Henning Wackerhage have collaborated with ICU physicians and researchers from London, Berlin and Munich to write a systematic review and meta-analysis to summarise data on the amount of muscle that ICU patients lose per day and on the methods that are used to measure this. This paper has now been published in Critical Care.  
The key take home message from the paper is that “On average, critically ill patients lose nearly 2% of skeletal muscle per day during the first week of ICU admission.” Such a major loss of muscle mass is a major problem especially because other research shows that a global loss of muscle mass is associated with a gain in fat mass and poor blood glucose homoestasis. 
The Exercise Biology team also currently carries out experimental studies especially with Prof. Dr. Stefan Schaller (Charite Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Manfred Blobner (TUM) in critically ill patients to understand the mechanisms of muscle loss and to develop strategies to prevent such muscle loss from happening.