A weak hand grip, as an indicator of diminished muscular strength, may be linked with early death, illness or disability, Canadian researchers say.

The firmness of a person's grip could be a better assessment of overall health than other diagnostic techniques such as a blood pressure measurement, they suggest, and can be an accurate predictor of possible functional limitations or disabilities later in life.

"Grip strength could be an easy and inexpensive test to assess an individual's risk of death and cardiovascular disease," says Dr. Darryl Leong, a professor of medicine at McMaster University in Ontario.

"Doctors or other health care professionals can measure grip strength to identify patients with major illnesses such as heart failure or stoke who are at particularly high risk of dying from their illness," says Leong, who is also a cardiologist.

Hand grip strength typically decreases with age, and routine actions - opening a jar or turning a key in a door - can become difficult to accomplish.

To see if there was prognostic value in measuring grip strength, the researchers followed around 140,000 adults aged 35 to 70 for 4 years, tracking their health while periodically measuring their muscle strength using a hand-grip dynamometer.

After adjusting for age, sex, education and level of physical activity, the researchers found that for every 5-kilogram (11-pound) decrease in hand grip strength, there was a 16 percent increase in risk of death from any cause and a 17 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death.

The new study supports previous research that linked hand-grip strength to a number of issues in aging, including future mortality, cognitive decline, disability and the ability to recover from hospital stays

For cardiovascular disease in particular, taking blood pressure readings is the currently favored diagnostic test to measure a patient's health.

A grip strength test performed during an annual physical would be a cost-effective and less-invasive diagnostic tool, the researchers suggest in their published study in The Lancet.

Their study suggests hand grip is a stronger forecaster of early death than systolic blood pressure, they said.

Further research should be undertaken to calibrate what constitutes a healthy hand grip, they added, since it can vary depending on a person's weight, size and ethnicity.