Handgrip Strength and Mortality in Maintenance Hemodialysis Patients

Muscle strength assessment is a convenient clinical test that has shown to correlate with the nutritional status of dialysis patients. Articles written in English to investigate the association between Handgrip Strength (HGS) and mortality in Maintenance Hemodialysis (MHD) patients are mainly from Brazil and several other non-Asian countries.

This study aimed to examine the association of HGS with all-cause mortality in Chinese MHD patients.

The current multicenter observational longitudinal study enrolled MHD patients from June 2015 to June 2016. The study setting was seven dialysis centers of tertiary general hospitals in Guizhou province, China. Patients were followed up until June 2018. The ROC curves were plotted to seek the best cutoffs for HGS to predict mortality in men and women. Survival analysis was done using the Kaplan-Meier survival curve and the Cox proportional hazard model.

We enrolled 857 MHD patients and followed up for 24.9 ± 10.2 months. During the follow-up, 204 (23.8%) patients died, 39 (4.6%) received renal transplantation, 18 (2.1%) switched to peritoneal dialysis, and 118 (11.7%) were transferred to nonparticipating dialysis units. The cutoff value of HGS to predict all-cause mortality was 12.4 kg for women and 25 kg for men. Utilizing the cutoffs to fit the survival curve of Kaplan-Meier, the correlation of HGS with mortality was verified for both genders. After adjustment for demographic and biochemical variables, HGS remained an independent predictor of all-cause mortality.

Handgrip strength was strongly associated with all-cause mortality in patients receiving MHD. The cutoff values to predict all-cause mortality were 12.4 kg for women and 25 kg for men. Handgrip strength may be incorporated into clinical practice for assessing functional status and predicting prognosis in MHD patients.