Association Between Grip Strength And Cognitive Impairment In Elderly Community

Background: Cognitive impairment is one of the current symptoms affecting people's daily life.Early recognition of cognitive impairment can take interventions to slow the progression of symptoms.Grip strength is an indicator which can reflect the physical functional status.Recently,domestic and foreign research have gradually found that grip strength can be used as a marker for predicting cognitive impairment.However,there are few studies on the relationship between the grip strength and cognitive function of the elderly community in China.Objective: To explore the association between grip strength and cognitive impairment in Chinese elderly community.Methods: A total of 1743 study populations(aged?60 years old)were selected from the Confucius Hometown Aging Project.They were divided into cognitive normal group and cognitive impairment group.The basic demographic characteristics,life behavior measurement and past disease history of the study population were collected through questionnaires.The data of the left-hand and right-hand grip strength was used by the dynamometer,and the cognitive function was evaluated by the MMSE scale.Furthermore,a follow-up investigation which have the same items was performed over the next 4 years.For the data analysis,t-test and chi-square test were used to analysis the basic demographic data between the two groups.Besides that,the logistic regression analysis and linear regression analysis was used to calculate the association between grip strength and cognitive function as well as the effect of related confounding factors.Results: After a basic demographic survey,a total of 1464 study populations were included in baseline data analysis.After adjusting for the confounding factors,there was a significant association between grip strengths and cognitive function(95% confidence interval [CI],0.052,0.109,P < 0.001).After 4 years of follow-up,a total of 938 study people in the baseline populations participated in the collection of follow-up data.Analysis of the relationship between grip strength and different cognitive domains in baseline and follow-up data showed significant correlation(P<0.05).Conclusions: Among the elderly people in rural China,grip strength would have a certain relationship with cognitive function.Grip strength can be one of the simple and convenient markers for detecting cognitive decline.