Handgrip strength conditional tolerance regions suggest the need for personalized sarcopenia definition: an analysis of the American NHANES database.

Abstract

Handgrip strength (HGS) is a well-established clinical biomarker that assesses functional capacity in older populations. In addition, HGS is a diagnostic tool that forecasts aging health conditions, such as sarcopenia. This paper provides HGS statistical tolerance regions and presents the need to establish HGS reference values according to patients' characteristics. For this purpose, we used a conditional tolerance algorithm for HGS, and we observed the tolerances regions in different age strata and sex of non-sarcopenic individuals from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, wave 2011-2012). Our results have critical implications for sarcopenia, since conventional and available HGS cut-offs do not consider age range. This paper offers new perspectives on the evolution of traditional definitions of sarcopenia according to the principles of precision medicine.