《柳叶刀》研究：握力是健康的信号

The little bit of strength with which the hand grabs something is grip strength.

People with weak grip strength often have poorer health.

More than ten years ago, a very large study looked at 140,000 people.

These 140,000 people lived in many countries, and the researchers followed them for several years.

The study calculated a number: for every 5-kilogram decrease in grip strength, the risk of death is 16% higher.

There were also somewhat more people who died from heart and blood vessel diseases.

The study also said that grip strength can reveal these things better than blood pressure.

Blood pressure is the number doctors look at when they measure your arm; grip strength is more accurate than it.

Just training the strength of the hands cannot make your life longer.

But grip strength is a signal that can help people see the overall condition of the body.

The hand can tell about the whole body because the hand does not move by itself.

At Ohio University in the United States there is a physiologist named Brian Clark.

He studies how the body works, and he says muscles are like puppets.

A puppet only moves when someone pulls strings above it.

Clark says the strings are in the brain, and muscles stand at the end of a chain of command.

The brain gives the order, and only then can the hand grip tightly.

Each time the hand grips, the brain must manage 39 muscles in the hand and wrist.

When the five fingers exert force together, the total force is less than what they produce separately added up.

So whether the strength of the hand is great also depends on whether the brain is good.

There was a small experiment that found old people to test hand strength.

Old people who did poorly on brain tests also had more weakness in hand strength.

There is also a researcher on aging named Ivan Bautmans.

He says that a gradual decrease in grip strength may be a signal that the brain is having problems first.

Testing hand strength this way is very cheap and very simple, and can remind people early.

The two hands being different is also interesting.

The strength of the commonly used hand is a little greater than the other, which is very common.

If the difference is too great, it is worth paying attention to.

Because one hand is mainly controlled by one side of the brain.

When the brain has a problem, often one side is damaged first while the other side is still fine.

Bautmans says that if one hand is so weak that it is only half of the other hand, you should be careful.

Weak hand strength, or a big difference between the two hands, is not a disease.

It is just a reminder that one should go to the hospital for a check-up.

Later, someone put many studies together to look at, and the number of people looked at was very large.

The result is still the same: people with stronger grip strength later had fewer brain problems.

Now some doctors have old people train the strength of the whole body, not just the hands.

What is trained is the whole body, and what is thought about is the brain.