America Is Losing Its Grip

America Is Losing Its Grip

• Raising the American Weakling

"When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. 
More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded via a hand-held dynamometer, were “not anywhere close to the norms” that had been established back in the 1980s.
...the revelation seemed to encapsulate any number of smoldering fears in one handy conflagration: 
The loss of human potential in the face of automation, of our increasing time spent on smartphones and other devices, the erosion of our masculine norms, of the fragility and general shiftlessness of millennials. 
...That message was reinforced by the sheer predictive power of grip strength. 
In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength. 
Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”...
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