It seems that the handshakes not only play an important role in business negotiations, they also act has indicator to one’s risk of suffering from illness, disability or even an early death, a new study has revealed.
According to researchers at the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, the firmness of your hand grip is better than your blood pressure at assessing your health. The researchers say that reduced muscular strength, measured by your grip, is consistently linked with early death, disability and illness.
For their study, the researchers followed almost 140,000 adults aged 35 to 70 over a period of four years in 17 countries and measured their muscle strength using a handgrip dynamometer. The participants were taking part in the Population Health Research Institute’s Prospective Urban-Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study.
After analysis of the data gathered, researchers found that for every five kilogram decline in grip strength, there was a one in six increased risk of death from any cause. There was the same 17 per cent higher risk of death from either heart disease or stroke, or non-cardiovascular conditions.
“Grip strength could be an easy and inexpensive test to assess an individual’s risk of death and cardiovascular disease,” said principal investigator Dr. Darryl Leong, an assistant professor of medicine of McMaster’s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine and cardiologist for the hospital.
Watch the interview with Dr Leong here [mov format].
Dr Leong suggests that doctors and other healthcare professionals can easily measure grip strength of their patients to identify whether they may be suffering from a major illnesses such as heart failure or gauge who all are a particularly high risk of dying from their illness.
These associations with grip strength were not accounted for by differences in age, sex, education level, employment status, physical activity, tobacco and alcohol use, diet, BMI, waist-to-hip ratio or other conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer, coronary artery disease, COPD, stroke or heart failure, or their country’s wealth.
Healthy grip strength does depend on the individual’s size and weight, and according to researchers the grip strength appeared to vary with ethnicity. They say that further analysis is needed to identify the cut-offs for healthy grip strength in people from different countries.
Leong added that more research is also needed to establish whether efforts to improve muscle strength are likely to reduce an individual’s risk of death and cardiovascular disease.
The research is published in the journal The Lancet.
