《柳叶刀》研究：握力是健康的信号

That bit of force in a handshake may predict how long a person will live better than blood pressure does.

In 2015, a study tracked nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries.

Researchers followed them for an average of four years, seeing who later fell ill and who died.

The conclusion was simple: the lower the grip strength, the higher the risk of death.

For every 5-kilogram decrease in grip strength, the risk of death was 16% higher.

The risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was also 17% higher.

What surprised researchers even more was that grip strength predicted both types of death better than systolic blood pressure.

However, just squeezing a grip trainer every day cannot make a person live several more years.

Its value is not in exercise, but in being cheap and measurable at any time.

So why can the strength in the hands reflect the condition of the whole body?

Clark, a physiologist at Ohio University, says muscles are puppets.

The strings are in the hands of the brain and nerves; muscles are merely the last link in the chain of command.

A powerful fist clench requires the brain to coordinate the 39 muscles of the palm and wrist.

When the fingers tighten together, the total force is actually less than the sum of their individual strengths.

What grip strength reflects is precisely the efficiency with which the brain sends commands down this chain.

A small 2024 experiment with older people pointed in the same direction.

People with lower cognitive test scores also had a larger shortfall in force when exerting themselves.

At the Free University of Brussels there is a scholar who studies aging, named Bautmans.

He says that weakening grip strength is sometimes an early signal of cognitive decline.

A simple, cheap grip test could become a valuable early warning.

A meta-analysis in April of this year pooled nine long-term studies.

Together these studies included nearly 900,000 people and also compared the strength of both hands.

The result: people whose two hands differed greatly in strength were more at risk.

Their likelihood of dying from cardiovascular disease was 29% higher.

It is very common for the dominant hand to be about 10% stronger than the other.

Each hand is mainly controlled by the opposite side of the brain, and degeneration often progresses at different rates on the two sides.

Bautmans warns that when one hand is left with only half the strength of the other, one should be alert.

Of course, weak grip or asymmetry between the two sides is not itself a diagnosis.

It only suggests that perhaps further examinations should be done.

Bautmans also co-authored a meta-analysis published in June of this year.

This analysis compiled 60 observational studies involving about 380,000 people.

People with stronger grip strength were 19% less likely to experience cognitive decline.

The article also mentions that full-body strength training can help keep the mind clear.

This ordinary number, hand strength, is increasingly being treated by researchers as a window.