Could Handgrip Strength Help Identify Children at Cardiovascular Risk?

By Ana Espino | Published on June 02, 2026 | 4 min read


Abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, and insulin resistance are appearing increasingly early in life. These cardiometabolic risk factors, once considered primarily adult health concerns, now affect a growing proportion of children and adolescents. Early detection is essential to help prevent the future development of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

Although healthcare professionals have various tools to assess these risks, most require laboratory testing or complex clinical measurements that can be difficult to implement on a large scale. In recent years, muscular fitness has attracted growing attention as a potential indicator of health. Among the available tests, handgrip strength, measured using a dynamometer, offers several advantages: it is quick, inexpensive, and non-invasive.

An important question remains: at what level of strength should a child be considered at increased cardiometabolic risk? To answer this, an international team of researchers sought to establish age- and sex-specific reference thresholds, transforming this simple test into a practical screening tool.

A Few Seconds of Testing Could Reveal Important Health Information

The researchers first analyzed data from more than 1,100 Spanish children aged 8 to 11 years participating in the MOVI-2 study. Handgrip strength was measured and then adjusted for body weight to obtain a standardized indicator that better reflects actual muscular fitness.

This measure was compared with a cardiometabolic risk score incorporating several parameters: waist circumference, blood pressure, triglyceride levels, HDL cholesterol, and fasting insulin concentrations.

The results showed that lower muscular strength was associated with higher cardiometabolic risk. Among boys aged 8 to 11 years, the identified threshold was 0.38 kilograms of grip strength per kilogram of body weight. For girls of the same age, the threshold was slightly lower at 0.34.

To assess the robustness of these findings, the authors then conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis including nine additional studies from several countries, representing a total of more than 10,500 children and adolescents.

The pooled analysis confirmed that optimal thresholds vary according to sex and developmental stage. Among children aged 6 to 12 years, the estimated thresholds were 0.39 for boys and 0.30 for girls. During adolescence, these values increased to 0.42 and 0.36, respectively, reflecting the physiological changes associated with growth and puberty.

The researchers also found that the test’s ability to identify young people at cardiometabolic risk was particularly strong among adolescent girls, for whom diagnostic performance was highest.

Could a Simple Handshake Become a Prevention Tool?

This study provides new benchmarks for the use of handgrip strength as an early marker of cardiometabolic health in young people. It suggests that a test taking only a few seconds could help identify children who may benefit from closer monitoring or more intensive preventive interventions.

However, the authors note several limitations. The identified thresholds vary across studies depending on measurement protocols and the definitions used for cardiometabolic risk. In addition, most of the data come from observational studies, meaning that a direct causal relationship between low muscular strength and future disease development cannot be established.

Despite these limitations, the findings strengthen the view that muscular fitness is an important health indicator from childhood onward. They also support the integration of simple strength assessments into pediatric health monitoring programs.

In the long term, this work could contribute to the development of accessible screening tools for use in schools and primary care settings—a particularly promising prospect at a time when the early prevention of cardiometabolic diseases has become a major public health priority.



About the author – Ana Espino
PhD in Immunology, specialized in Virology  
As a scientific writer, Ana is passionate about bridging the gap between research and real-world impact. With expertise in immunology, virology, oncology, and clinical studies, she makes complex science clear and accessible. Her mission: to accelerate knowledge sharing and empower evidence-based decisions.