Grip strength

Alert reader Jocelyn sent me an article about grip strength. According to the article, grip strength is one of the best metrics for determining healthy aging. That’s because it’s “an efficient proxy for total muscle conditioning, which is itself a great proxy for overall nutrition, physical activity, and disease profiles. In other words, it’s a proxy for a proxy.”

Grip strength effectively predicts the decline in muscle conditioning which is associated with aging and mortality. One study found that, among people who’d had their grip strength measured in 1965, the ones who lived to be 100 were 2.5 times more likely to have had grip strength results in the highest third.

Developing grip strength alone won't protect you against disease and early death. It's an indicator of your overall muscle strength and conditioning. Muscle strength helps to defend us against the ravages of age. It  cushions our joints and bones, protects us from falls, and even soaks up excess glucose in the blood to reduce the risk of developing type-2 diabetes or insulin resistance.

The way to measure grip strength is with a dynamometer, pictured here. 

Assuming you don’t have one of these lying around your house, you can also test yourself with a tennis ball (which you probably don’t have either). If you get ahold of one, you should be able to squeeze it hard for 15 to 30 seconds.

As luck would have it, the day after receiving this article I had an appointment with my hand surgeon to arrange another carpal tunnel release surgery. (I’ve had it on my right hand; now I needed it on my left.) I got a measurement of 50. I asked the doctor about my reading. He said it was “decent.” I looked it up on a chart. For my age group, my rating was between normal and strong. I guess that’s the same as decent.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Paying for your BP test

The other day, I had to go to urgent care to have a laceration sewed up. (Freak accident: When opening my car door, I managed to lacerate my lower leg on the door’s sharp edge. Eight stitches.) Anyhow, I was thrilled that Doctors on Duty didn’t take my blood pressure. It’s always sky high in such situations. I usually refuse to have it taken, and hate having to deal with that issue each time I visit a medical practitioner. (Though my BP is a little high, I don’t take meds for it.) Besides, I’m suspicious of this BP-taking routine and think it’s a scam of sorts.

Even though having your BP taken seems inconsequential, the medical practice gets paid for it, and insurance, including Medicare, pays for it. For every procedure you have at a hospital or at the doctor’s office—no matter how insignificant—a code is assigned. It’s how they get their money from insurers. Listen to the heart: code; insert a line: code; take blood pressure: code; and so forth. The more they code, the more money they receive from insurers. The more procedures, the more codes. If you look closely at your medical bills, you can see all those seemingly trivial procedures on the bill. It makes me mad and probably raises my blood pressure.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Biodiversity: Male? Female?

A friend of mine posted the following on Facebook:

“It’s a scientific fact that humans come in two varieties: XX for female, and XY for male. Except:

• You can be born appearing female but have a 5-alpha reductase deficiency and grow a penis at age 12.
• You can be born legally male with an X and a Y chromosome, but your body is insensitive to androgens, and you appear female.
• You can be born legally male with an X and a Y chromosome and have a penis and testes and a uterus and fallopian tubes.
• You can be born legally male with an X and a Y chromosome, but your Y chromosome is missing the SRY gene, which gives you a female body.
• You can be born legally female with two X chromosomes, but one of the Xs has an SRY gene, which gives you a male body.
• You can be born legally female with two X chromosomes, but your adrenal gland doesn’t produce enough cortisol, and your body develops as male.
• You can be born with XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes (chimerism).”

I call this diversity. 

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The Blue Zones debunked

 You may have seen a Netflix documentary called Blue Zones. It’s about those supposedly amazing places—from Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece—where a disproportionate number of people live into a very old age. Dr. Saul Newman, a research fellow at the University College London Center for Longitudinal Studies, debunked the blue-zone research with studies of his own. He found undetected errors in every blue zone. As he notes in an interview, “...there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents.”

What he found in his studies was a lack of documentation certifying people’s deaths as well as many cases of age fraud—people claiming to be older than they are. For example, families who didn’t register their relatives’ deaths collected their social security money. In Greece, he found that at least 72 percent of the people who were supposedly over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from “underground”—that is, they were dead and buried. In the United States, he found that at least 17 percent of people purported to be over the age of 100 were, in fact, either clerical errors, missing or dead.

The documentary shows old people in Okinawa happily tending to their gardens. In fact, Okinawans aren’t gardeners. The government of Japan has been measuring life in Okinawa and other prefectures since 1975. Their records indicate that, in the matter of growing gardens, Okinawa is third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. Government records also show that Okinawans are third to last in their consumption of root and leafy green vegetables. In fact, according to government data, Okinawa lands at the bottom of the health pile.

Loma Linda, California, is the single U.S. blue zone. It’s known for its high concentration of Seventh-day Adventists, who eat a mostly plant-based diet. Newman says the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan and found that “it is completely and utterly unremarkable.”

As Newman reminds us, the core of science is reproducibility. Not only have the blue zone results not been reproduced, but the underlying blue zone data has never been published.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.