Hand Grip Muscle Strength, Endurance and Anthropometric Parameters in Healthy Young Adults: A Cross-sectional Study

Abstract

Introduction: Hand grip muscle strength and endurance are non invasive simple diagnostic tool for diagnosis as well to check prognosis in health and disease. But there are many factors like age, ethnicity etc., that influence the hand grip muscle strength and endurance. Failure to understand the determinants that influence the strength and endurance would decrease the reliability of these tests as diagnostic and prognostic tool. Aim: To evaluate the influence of anthropometric parameters like height, weight, Body Mass Index (BMI) on handgrip muscle strength and endurance. Materials and Methods: The present cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Physiology, Gauhati Medical College and Hospital, Guwahati, Assam, India in the month of November and December 2019, after obtaining Institutional Ethical Committee (IEC) clearance. In this study 80 healthy young adults had given informed written consent to participate. After a brief history taking to ensure that participants met the inclusion criteria, height, weight were measured using measuring tape and weighing machine respectively and BMI was calculated using the formula weight (kg)/height (m)2 . Handgrip muscle strength and endurance were measured using hand grip dynamometer. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 16.0 version software was used to calculate mean of all variables, Pearson correlation coefficient to analyse the correlation of variables and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test for analysis of significance. The p-value≤0.05 was considered statistically significance. Results: In this study, 47 (58.75%) were males, showed higher values in almost all parameters like height, weight, muscle strength except BMI, than the females who constituted 33 (41.25%) of the study participants. There was also significant moderate positive correlation of height (r=0.621, p<0.001), weight (r=0.519, p<0.001) with hand grip muscle strength and only height (r=0.438, p<0.001) showed correlation with muscle endurance. Conclusion: The present study showed positive correlation of height and weight with muscle strength and height with endurance, as such it can be concluded that height, weight are the anthropometric parameters that influence hand grip muscle strength. So, influences of these factors should be kept in mind while using hand grip muscle strength or endurance as diagnostic or prognostic tool.