The authors reply: Letter on: "Pitfalls in the measurement of muscle mass: a need for a reference standard" by Clark et al.

However, semantics aside, we think that DXA can indeed serve as a reference standard for measuring muscle mass. Obviously, CT and MRI are advanced techniques that can and have been used to obtain important information such as muscle size/volume and more recently amount and distribution of intra- and intermuscular adipose tissue. Also individual muscles can be assessed separately. However, with respect to muscle mass, the comparison of DXA with CT/MRI is rather difficult because DXA and QCT/MRI measure different physical parameters.