Korean J Epidemiol.  2006 Dec;28(2):182-188.

Correlation Between Muscle Amounts and Grasp Power in the Elderly People, Jejudo

• Lee H
• Park M
• Go Y
• Yang YJ
• Bae JM

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
This study was conducted to examine the relationships between muscle mass and hand strength in elderly people.
METHODS
The study subjects were 659 volunteers aged older than 65 in Jejudo, south Korea. The anthropometric information such as weight, body mass index (BMI) and muscular mass was collected by the body composition analyzer. The hand strength was obtained by the digital grip dynamometer. The fasting blood sugar index called as potential diabetes mellitus (DM) was defined as the condition over 120 mg/dL of the blood sugar. The BMI was classified into under 23, 23-25 and over 25 to analyze the relationships of BMI and muscle mass, hand strength.
RESULTS
The factors affecting muscle mass were sex (p<0.001), age (p<0.001) and BMI (p<0.001). The factors affecting hand strength were sex (p<0.001), age (p<0.001) and BMI (p=0.003). And there was a weak association between muscle mass and hand strength after controlling with the affected factors (r2=0.15, p<0.001).
CONCLUSIONS
The hand strength is weekly correlated with the muscle mass. So we recommend to use digital grip dynamometer combining with other measurements for diagnosis the sarcopenia in epidemiologic study.

Keyword

Skeletal muscle; Hand strength; Correlation study; Aged group

MeSH Terms

Aged*
Blood Glucose
Body Composition
Body Weight
Diabetes Mellitus
Diagnosis
Epidemiologic Studies
Fasting
Hand Strength*
Humans
Jeju-do*
Korea
Muscle, Skeletal
Sarcopenia
Statistics as Topic
Volunteers
Blood Glucose