Strong hands may help prevent dementia

Improving your hand strength may be useful for more than opening jars of pickles.

New research suggests that better hand strength is linked to better cognitive health and may prevent some dementia.

A large study published by JAMA Network Open found that poor handgrip strength in midlife was associated with cognitive decline a decade later. More than 190,000 dementia-free men and women were involved in the study and followed for at least 10 years. Participants, whose average age at the study’s outset was 56, took tests that measured handgrip strength, problem-solving skills, memory and reasoning abilities. They also underwent brain imaging.

The study found that people with lower grip scores were more likely to experience problems with thinking and memory later in life. They were also more likely to be diagnosed with dementia.  

Handgrip strength was associated with fluid intelligence, the ability to think and reason abstractly and solve problems; prospective memory, remembering to perform a planned action or recall a planned intention in the future, and dementia diagnoses.

The type of dementia most clearly linked to handgrip strength is vascular dementia, which involves problems with reasoning, planning, judgment, memory and other thought processes that are typically caused by impaired blood flow to the brain. There appeared to be no link between handgrip strength and Alzheimer’s disease.

The study does not prove that poor handgrip strength causes cognitive decline. But it confirms earlier research that suggested a link.

One earlier study, published in 2006, found older Mexican Americans with reduced handgrip strength had a statistically significant decline in cognitive function over a 7-year period. By contrast, participants in the highest handgrip strength quartile maintained a higher level of cognitive function.

A 2019 study concluded that handgrip strength measurement is a simple way to determine poorer cognitive functioning. Interventions aiming to prevent or delay cognitive dysfunction should also implement measures of handgrip strength as an assessment tool for determining efficacy.

What makes the latest study more useful is that it offers evidence that handgrip strength is linked to several markers of cognitive aging, including neuroimaging markers of cerebral small vessel disease and subtypes of dementia. Its conclusions also suggest that efforts to increase