Overview
- Published Oct. 15 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, the study reports that greater handgrip strength is associated with less progression to heart, liver, or kidney dysfunction and lower mortality among people with excess body fat.
- Researchers analyzed 93,275 UK Biobank participants classified with preclinical obesity and followed them for a mean 13.4 years using multistate models tracking stages of organ dysfunction and death.
- Each standard-deviation increase in grip strength correlated with reduced risk at multiple stages, including baseline to first dysfunction (adjusted HR 0.86), first to double dysfunctions (0.92), and double dysfunctions to death (0.87).
- Findings were consistent across alternative muscle metrics, including muscle-to-weight and lean-to-weight ratios, with reported signals of larger benefit for Black people, women, and non-smokers.
- Preclinical obesity was defined as elevated BMI plus at least one abnormal adiposity measure without organ dysfunction, and investigators emphasize the observational nature of the data while proposing low-cost grip testing and strength building as candidates for future trials.