Your Handshake Can Signal Your Health
Experts want to make it a frequently-checked vital sign
When assessing your overall health, healthcare professionals start by observing your vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiratory rate, and hand-grip strength.
Wait. Hand-grip strength?
While it’s true that hand-grip strength (HGS) is not yet considered one of the vital signs that are checked and recorded at the beginning of any medical exam or encounter, many researchers and practitioners believe that it should be added as a “fifth vital sign.”
What is hand-grip strength and how is it measured?
Often in medicine, practitioners will use jargon and acronyms that patients find hard to understand. “Hand-grip strength” is not one of those terms. It’s exactly what it sounds like: the amount of force you can generate with your hand.
Although a rudimentary understanding of a person’s grip strength can be felt in a simple handshake, there’s a tool designed specifically to measure a person’s hand-grip force. A dynamometer, which looks like a video game joystick with a pressure valve attached, is offered to the patient. The person is then instructed to squeeze the handle as hard as possible, at which point the force the…
