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 Using data from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging,
researchers found gender differences in potential reasons why men
and women lose their ability to maintain a firm grip.
A strong grip is helpful for activities of daily living. Carrying
grocery bags, lifting cartons of milk or juice, holding securely
onto railings – all require a good grip.
Grip strength, which has been shown to be an indicator of overall
muscle strength, is often used as a marker of physical functioning
and biological vitality, lead author Ola Sternang told Reuters
Health.
Chandra Reynolds, a psychologist on Sternang’s team, said grip
strength has been associated with falls and can be predictive of
risk for dying.
For the men in their study, working at physically intense jobs in
young adulthood was associated with a steep decline in grip strength
with aging, and so - for unexplained reasons – was being married in
late midlife, the study found.
Among women, those who smoked, reported early midlife stress and
were diagnosed with dementia suffered the steepest declines in grip
strength as they aged, according to the study published in Age and
Ageing.
Sternang, a psychologist, is a senior researcher at the Institute of
Gerontology at Jonkoping University and at Stockholm University,
both in Sweden.
“The thing that surprised me most was the obvious gender difference
in the risk-factor pattern during the adult life span,” he said in
an email.
Reynolds, a University of California at Riverside psychology
professor, noted that the findings in women seemed straightforward
compared to the findings in men.
“It seems there are more lifestyle-related factors for women, like
smoking and stress,” she told Reuters Health in a telephone
interview.
“For men, it was more physical functioning and chronic conditions.
That could mean different interventions for men and women,” she
said.
But the findings on men were complicated and in some cases
counterintuitive, the authors note in their paper. Why, for example,
would being married in late midlife predict a steep decline in grip
strength?
“For men, it’s just a more complex story,” Reynolds said. “The men’s
data need more unpacking.”
For Amy Yorke, a physical therapist and professor at the University
of Michigan-Flint who wasn’t involved in the study, the findings
brought to mind her grandfather, a farmer who suffered from
arthritis in his shoulders and his hands in his later years as a
result of overusing them as a younger man.
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“What we experience early in our life does have an impact in how we
perform later in life,” she told Reuters Health in a telephone
interview. “Men that tend to have more labor-intensive jobs tend to
have less grip strength later in life.”
Sternang and Reynolds and their colleagues measured grip strength
over 22 years in 849 participants who were 50 to 88 years old at the
start. They found that women’s grip strength began declining steeply
on average at age 67, while men’s significant decline began at age
72.
Prior research has shown that grip-strength tends to peak on average
between the ages of 30 and 40 and then decrease over time in both
men and women. But, the authors say, men’s grip strength decreases
faster with age than women’s, and the gender gap narrows slightly.
“There’s no pill that’s going to change the fact that we’re going to
get weaker as we get older,” Yorke said. “The only thing we can do
is to be more active.”
But not too active, not in a repetitive way that can cause problems,
researchers warn.
“Although we think about physical activity as being important to
physical health, and it is,” Reynolds said, “we also have to think
about strenuous physical activity as not always contributing to
health in positive ways.”
Yorke would like to see grip strength measurements taken at the same
time as height, weight and blood pressure during physical exams.
“It’s a very easy measure,” she said. “Just like they track my
height and weight, there should be a conversation about how strong
you are.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1ve9l97 Age and Ageing, online November 1,
2014.
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