The Grip Report

Your doctor wraps a cuff around your arm at every visit. The number goes in the chart, and it follows you. Nobody wraps anything around your hand. Yet in the largest prospective study of its kind, the strength of a squeeze predicted death from cardiovascular disease better than the cuff did. That study came out in 2015. Almost nobody has acted on it, because grip still feels like a party trick and blood pressure feels like medicine.