What if you could do just one thing to improve your risk profile against all cause mortality (death), incidence and mortality specifically from cardiovascular disease, all respiratory diseases including COPD, all cancer and certain subtypes such as colorectal, lung and breast cancers? Would concentrating on that single variable be of interest to you?

In March of this year, an interesting study was published in the British Medical Journal looking at information from the UK Biobank which is a giant set of health data collected from over half a million people in the United Kingdom aged 40-69. Specifically, the researchers were interested on a single factor and how it relates to a number of health outcomes:

Grip strength

That’s right. Grip strength. When was the last time you had grip strength measured? Maybe never? Well these researchers make an extremely strong case that grip strength is as important as any health variable in its predictive capabilities for health outcomes. Their data (surprisingly) showed grip strength is actually MORE IMPORTANT as a predictor of all cause mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality than the amount of general physical activity a person does or even systolic blood pressure!

Maybe at our general physicals we should be testing our grip instead of having our blood pressure taken…..or better yet have both.

Specifically they found that a 5kg lower grip strength was associated with the following:

For women:

• All cause mortality
• All cancer mortality
• Cardiovascular disease incidence
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder incidence
• All cancer incidence
• Lung cancer incidence

In Men:

• All cause mortality
• Cardiovascular disease mortality
• All respiratory disease mortality
• Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease mortality and incidence
• All cancer mortality and incidence including lung cancer
• Cardiovascular disease mortality

So what’s our take on this? Over the past few years there have been a handful of studies linking lower muscle function with mortality and diseases (including a study of over a million male teenagers followed over 24 years showing lower strength is associated with all cause mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality but not cancer). We know muscle mass is decreased in a lot of health conditions including cancer and respiratory disease and can help prevent ‘wasting’ once these conditions are diagnosed. But that doesn’t explain the strong predictive capability of grip strength.

Within the data in this study, it was seen that the lowest quarter for grip strength came from lower socioeconomic status neighbourhoods, had higher prevalence of smoking, obesity and co-morbidities like current cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression and hypertension. They also ate less fruits and vegetables, had lower levels of physical activity and higher levels of TV watching. Perhaps grip strength is simply a variable that has a broad association with how ‘healthy’ an individual is. All of the above factors are linked to many of the chronic diseases studied. It is no surprise that healthier people develop these disease less frequently.

When grip strength was added to a general office based risk score (age, sex, diagnosis of diabetes, BMI, systolic blood pressure and smoking) improves the prediction of all cause and cardiovascular disease mortality.

So next time you are in your doctors office for your now bi-annual physical, maybe you should ask “Hey doc, what about my grip strength”? Our medical model commonly measures blood pressure and appropriately medicates when elevated, why not measure grip, and appropriately prescribe exercise when decreased? It is just as or more important in predicting many diseases. Food for thought.

Overall we can sum up the study in one sentence:

“YOU CAN’T GO WRONG GETTING STRONG!”