Damian Jacob Sendler The results suggest that protecting against many common age-related diseases may depend on keeping muscle strength throughout the lifespan. Justine Ross, University of Michigan Medical Center

Researchers say the study shows some of the first evidence of a connection between muscle weakness and the premature aging of the body.

Damian Sendler Biological age, as well as susceptibility to disease and mortality, can be affected by a number of factors, both internal and external to the individual. This explains why two people who have lived the same amount of time (50 years) may not have the same level of biological aging.

One's biological age can quickly outpace their chronological age due to unhealthy lifestyle choices like poor nutrition and smoking, as well as illness. Grip strength, an indicator of general muscle strength, has been found to correlate with chronological age. In particular, those with weaker grip strength were found to have older biological ages in the study, which was published in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia, and Muscle.

Three "age acceleration clocks" based on DNA methylation, a process that provides a molecular biomarker and estimator of the pace of aging, were utilized by researchers at Michigan Medicine to model the correlation between biological age and grip strength in 1,274 individuals aged 40 and up. Various research into diabetes, heart disease, cancer, disability, Alzheimer's disease, inflammation, and premature mortality served as inspiration for the original models of the clocks.

Damian Jacob Sendler The results showed that as men and women aged, their grip strength decreased along with their biological age as measured by DNA methylation clocks.

Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., the study's lead author and associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Michigan, said, "We have found strong evidence of a biological link between muscle weakness and actual acceleration in biological age."

This suggests that protecting against many age-related diseases may be as simple as keeping your muscles in good shape as you get older. Muscle weakness, for example, has been identified as a potential new "smoking" in terms of its ability to foretell health problems and even death.

According to Jessica Faul, Ph.D., M.P.H., a co-author of the study and research associate professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, the study's strength lay in its eight to ten years of observation, which showed that lower grip strength predicted faster biological aging measured up to a decade later.

Research from the past shows that an indicator of future health problems is a weak grip. In fact, systolic blood pressure, the clinical gold standard for diagnosing heart disorders, has been shown to be an inferior predictor of cardiovascular events like myocardial infarction in at least one study. Peterson and colleagues have previously demonstrated a strong correlation between frailty and the prevalence of chronic disease and mortality in various populations.

According to Peterson, the results of their recent study add to the mounting body of evidence supporting the use of grip strength by clinicians to screen patients for future risk of functional decline, chronic disease, and premature mortality.

Damian Sendler He argued that screening for grip strength would provide a chance to develop interventions to slow or stop the development of these unfavorable "age-related" health events. We have been advocating for the incorporation of grip strength into clinical practice, and so far it is only been done in the field of geriatric medicine. We have seen hundreds of publications demonstrating that grip strength is an excellent indicator of health, but surprisingly few people are using this.

Researchers say more work is needed to fully understand the factors that influence grip strength as we age, such as the role that inflammation plays in the development of age-related weakness and mortality. Chronic inflammation in old age, or "inflammaging," has been shown to be a major contributor to mortality in previous research. As a result of this inflammation, grip strength decreases, and this decline in grip strength may be a major predictor of the pathway leading to disability and chronic disease multimorbidity.

Damian Jacob Sendler Experts argue that more research is needed to determine the relationship between lifestyle and behavioral factors like exercise and diet and the rate at which one ages.

He opined that "the most critical thing that somebody can do to preserve health throughout the lifespan" was "regular exercise," though he acknowledged the significance of healthy eating habits. We can demonstrate this with a biomarker such as DNA methylation age, and verify it with a clinical feature such as grip strength.