It is often said that one can gauge a person by his/her handshake with a strong grip reflecting confidence and power among other characteristics.
Now, a new study has found a person's handshake grip to be an indicative tool for something else as well - their age.
According to researchers at the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Stony Brook University, an individual's hand-grip strength i.e. the strength of their grasp could be a great way to measure a person's real age.
The study was published on Wednesday, May 7, and took into consideration findings from over 50 studies that concentrated on people of all ages worldwide.
The researchers discovered that the hand grip of an individual is correlated with other key indicators of aging like "future mortality, disability, cognitive decline and ability to recover from hospital stays."
"Hand-grip strength is easily measured and data on hand-grip strength now can be found in many of the most important surveys on aging worldwide," says Warren Sanderson, Professor of Economics with joint appointment in History at Stony Brook University.
The new research also demonstrates how the hand-grip test can be used as an effective tool to measure aging even when making comparisons with myriad "population groups." To establish how the same could be done, the researchers deployed data from the United States Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) survey.
"We found that based on this survey, a 65-year-old white woman who had not completed secondary education has the same handgrip strength as a 69-year-old white woman who had completed secondary education. This suggests that according to a handgrip strength characteristic their ages are equivalent and 65 year-old women ages four years faster due to lower education attainment," says Serguei Scherbov, co-author of the study.
The research is also being funded partially by the European Research Council (ERC). Moreover, based on characteristics and factors that are indicative of people (like health, demographics, any disabilities, longevity etc.), Sanderson and Scherbov have started defining the measures of aging.
In the past, research by these two scientists has revealed that only measuring the age of individuals based on their life span is not a clear indicator of the aging process as it is unable to reflect the variations properly. However, with the adoption of the current characteristic-based methodology, the researchers are able to mark the aging process differences that exist among varied population groups, which may not be possible to identify otherwise.
"Our goal is to measure how fast different groups in a society age. If some group is getting older faster than another, we can ask why that might be and see whether there are any policies that could help the faster aging group," opines Scherbov.
The study has been published in the journal Public Library of Science ONE (PLOS ONE).
