The firmness of your hand grip is better than your blood pressure at assessing your health, Hamilton researchers have found, and reduced muscular strength, measured by your grip, is consistently linked with early death, disability and illness.
The research by the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences was published in the journal The Lancet today.
“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. “Doctors or other healthcare professionals can measure grip strength to identify patients with major illnesses such as heart failure or stroke who are at particularly high risk of dying from their illness.”
