How strong is your grip? Your strength could determine your future diabetes risk!

New Delhi: Diabetes is a disease that could be hereditary and can also develop due to an unhealthy lifestyle.

Normally, a simple blood test can determine whether or not you're at a risk of diabetes in the future. Apart from this, there are many medically prescribed ways and means to ensure prevention from developing what doctors have labeled a 'silent killer'.

But, a new study has found a way to figure out any future risk. If you want to know whether you're at a risk of developing diabetes in the future, simply check your grip, the study says.

According to the study, the strength of one's grip may help predict if they are at risk of developing diabetes at a later age. In this case, a weaker grip may signify a future diabetes risk.

Researchers, including those from University of Michigan in the US, investigated if normalized grip strength – which is defined as a person's grip strength divided by their body mass – could serve as a biomarker for both cardiometabolic disease and physical disability in American and Chinese adults.

The team used data on middle-aged and older adults from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2011 to 2012 and 2013 to 2014, and the 2011 portion of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.

These surveys were selected because they included measures of muscle strength capacity and the necessary information pertaining to disability and cardiometabolic diseases.

Researchers analyzed normalized grip strength for about 4,544 US and 6,030 Chinese study participants 50 years of age and older.

The study group also had blood samples taken for non-fasting glycated hemoglobin and answered a questionnaire about impairments of functional limitation related to mobility.

A subsample of 2,225 adults had fasting measures for glucose, insulin and triglycerides.

Using weighted logistic regression models, the team assessed the association between normalized grip strength and diabetes, hyperglycemia, hypertriglyceridemia, low High-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, hypertension and physical disability.

They controlled for age, sex and numerous socio-demographic characteristics.

Researchers found that for every 0.05 decrement in normalized grip strength in US and Chinese adults, respectively, there were 49 percent and 17 percent increased odds for diabetes.

"Prevalence of chronic disease is highest in the US and China and there's a dire need to identify midlife predictors of disability and diabetes in both populations," Mark Peterson, assistant professor at University of Michigan.

"To asses someone's grip strength using a hand grip dynamometer takes less than 10 seconds, which makes it extremely attractive to adopt in a clinical or community setting at the population level," Peterson said.

The study was published in Journals of Gerontology Series A: Medical Sciences.

(With PTI inputs)