Securing a Grip on Safety and Longevity
- By Robert Pater
- Aug 01, 2022
Did you know that hand strength is related to personal safety—as well as to how long people live? Sounds farfetched, even shocking? Healthy skepticism is good (as long as it doesn’t verge into denial), so don’t take my or anyone else’s word. Check for yourself—my google search on “how stronger hands lengthen your life” came back with over 11 million hits! This is clearly much more than a rarity.
It’s not just some self-proclaimed expert’s opinion either. There are numerous well-designed, replicated double-blind medical studies corroborating the link between stronger grip and longer living. For example, the well-regarded BMJ (previously “The British Medical Journal”) cited a University College London’s review of over 14 studies on grip strength—total, over 53,000 people—revealing, “the death rate among the weakest (grip) people was 1.67 times greater than among strongest participants, taking age, sex, and body size into account.”
Sure, as workforces become grayer, overall sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss) naturally occurs, that is, unless people take action to compensate for this. But the correlation between weaker-grip-diminished-longevity doesn’t just apply to older people. Researcher Rachel Cooper, Ph.D. reflected on five of the grip strength studies that monitored participants with an average age under 60, “Grip strength measured at younger ages also predicted mortality.”
Further, a Norwegian study published in the December 2016 Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health concluded, “Grip strength was inversely associated with all-cause mortality rates in men and women…. in all age groups.” And the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health published German researcher, S. Zechmann’s study, “Grip strength: greater mortality predictor than systolic blood pressure.”
More evidence? Originally published in the prestigious Lancet, the British medical journal, “the Prospective Urban-Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study is a large, longitudinal population study done in 17 countries of varying incomes and sociocultural settings.” This study of over 140,000 participants indicated, “reduced muscular strength, as measured by grip strength, has been associated with an increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.