According to a study, palm of the hand could tell about the chances of having a heart attack, stroke or dying young. The study says a weak handgrip is associated with a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular diseases. It has also been found in the study that grip strength could help predict the chances of dying from these diseases than blood pressure.

According to lead researcher Darryl Leong, an assistant professor of medicine at McMaster and a cardiologist at the hospital, "Grip strength could be an easy and inexpensive test to assess an individual's risk of death and cardiovascular disease. Further research is needed to establish whether efforts to improve muscle strength are likely to reduce an individual's risk of death and cardiovascular disease".

Leong said it’s an important message that how many chances are there for one to die due to a range of illnesses if one has lower grip strength. The study has been conducted by the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences. It has been published in The Lancet, a UK medical journal. According to Doireann Maddock, from the British Heart Foundation, the study findings are interesting.

It was conducted in 17 countries, which are culturally and economically diverse. It was carried out in countries like Canada, Sweden, Zimbabwe and Pakistan. Approximately 140,000 adults between the ages of 35 to 70 for four years were followed by researchers.

The association between a range of health conditions and muscle strength was analyzed by researchers, and it was measured by grip strength. The researchers asked participants to compress a hand-grip dynamometer as hard as they can; it gives a reading in kilograms.