Getting a grip

NEXT time you shake hands with your doctor, beware—you may be giving away your life expectancy. A paper just published in the Lancet, by Darryl Leong of McMaster University in Canada, reports that a simple way to assess how likely someone is to die in the next few years is to test the strength of his grip.

Using a hand-held device called a dynamometer, Dr Leong and a team of collaborators across the world tested the grips of 140,000 people aged between 35 and 70 in 17 countries. Three of these countries—Canada, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates—were rich. Four—Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Zimbabwe—were poor. Ten, including Colombia, Poland and South Africa, were defined as middle-income. The researchers then followed their volunteers for an average of four years, and noted how many died, and what from.

There was a good deal of national variation. Swedes, it seems, have the world’s firmest handshakes, and Pakistanis the limpest. But, overall, the strength of someone’s grip was indeed a good predictor of...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1EEo2Cw