Role of handgrip strength in predicting new-onset diabetes: findings from the survey of health, ageing and retirement in Europe

BACKGROUND: Diabetes is a major concern for the global health burden. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between handgrip strength (HGS) and the risk of new-onset diabetes and to compare the predictive abilities between relative HGS and dominant HGS. METHODS: This longitudinal study used data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), including 66,100 European participants aged 50 years or older free of diabetes at baseline. The Cox proportional hazard model was used to analyze the relationship between HGS and diabetes, and the Harrell’s C index, net reclassification index (NRI), and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) were calculated to evaluate the predictive abilities of different HGS expressions. RESULTS: There were 5,661 diabetes events occurred during follow-up. Compared with individuals with lowest quartiles, the hazard ratios (95 % confidence intervals) of the 2nd-4th quartiles were 0.88 (0.81–0.94), 0.82 (0.76–0.89) and 0.85 (0.78–0.93) for dominant HGS, and 0.95 (0.88–1.02), 0.82 (0.76–0.89) and 0.60 (0.54–0.67) for relative HGS. After adding dominant HGS to an office-based risk score (including age, gender, body mass index, smoking, and hypertension), the incremental values of the Harrell’s C index, NRI, IDI of relative HGS were all slightly higher than those of dominant HGS in both training and validation sets. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings supported that HGS was an independent predictor of new-onset diabetes in the middle-aged and older European population. Moreover, relative HGS exhibited a slightly higher predictive ability than dominant HGS.