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Raising the American Weakling

崛起吧虚弱的美国人

There are two very different interpretations of our dwindling grip strength.

我们握力下降的两种截然不同的解释。

By Tom Vanderbilt

来自汤姆·范德比尔特

When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak.

当Elizabeth Fain作为一个临床医学训练师时，她开始注意到在她的诊所发生的怪事：她的病人是虚弱的。

More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded via a hand-held dynamometer, were “not anywhere close to the norms” that had been established back in the 1980s.

特别是他们的握力，通过握力记的记录（测试），达不到1980年代制定的标准。

Fain knew that physical activity levels and hand-use patterns had changed a lot since then.

Fain知道自那个时候起，身体活动等级（强度）和使用手部的方式已经有了很大的变化

Jobs had become increasingly automated, the professional and service sectors had grown, all sorts of measures of physical activity (like the likelihood that a child walks to school) had declined, and the personal computer age had dawned.

工作变得越来越自动化，专业和服务业的增长，身体活动（诸如一个孩子可能走路上学）所用的各处肌肉都退化了，并且个人电脑的时代已经到来。

But to see the numbers decline so steeply and quickly was still a surprise, and not just to her.

但是看到统计数字一落千丈还是令人惊讶，并且感到诧异的不止是她一个。

Unlike most findings in the sleepy field of occupational therapy, her findings, which were published last year in the Journal of Hand Therapy, touched off a media firestorm, as the revelation seemed to encapsulate any number of smoldering fears in one handy conflagration: The loss of human potential in the face of automation, of our increasing time spent on smartphones and other devices, the erosion of our masculine norms, of the fragility and general shiftlessness of millennials.

与大多数职业治疗领域死气沉沉（令人昏昏欲睡、不感兴趣）的发现不同，她发现的手部疗法在去年发表时触发了一场媒体大风波，就像许多被压抑的累积的恐惧在一场迅猛的大火中爆发：在面对自动化时人类潜力的丧失，我们花越来越多的时间在智能手机和其它设备上，它侵蚀了我们的男子气概，导致千禧一代是脆弱和垮掉的一代。

Even taking into account the cautionary statistical notes—that the sample sizes of the 1980s studies were not huge, that Fain’s study was mostly college students—the idea of a loss in human strength, expressed through a statistical measure hardly anyone had previously heard of, seemed to hint at some latter-day version of degeneration.

即使考虑到警示（性的）统计记录 -- 1980年代研究的样本量级也不是很大，Fain的研究对象是大量的（大部分是）大学生 -- 人们身体力量下降的想法，在通过统计测量表示前没有人听说过，似乎在暗示一些现代版的退化。

That message was reinforced by the sheer predictive power of grip strength.

这条信息强化了握力在预测此方面问题的纯粹性（？？？）。

In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength.

《柳叶刀》在2015年公布了一项研究  ，跨越17个国家的将近140000人的健康状况经过4年以上多种多样的措施的追踪，其中就包括握力。

Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”

握力不仅仅 “和全因死亡率负相关” -- 每减少五公斤握力便关联增加百分之十七的风险 -- 由McMaster大学医学教授Darryl Leong领导的团队注意到：“握力比血压在预测全因死亡和心血管死亡方面更有力”。

Grip strength has even been found to be correlated more robustly with “ageing markers” than chronological aging itself.

握力甚至被发现是比年龄本身更有说服力和相关的“老化的标志”。

It has become a key method of diagnosing sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass associated with aging.

它（握力）变成了一个关键性的方法去诊断肌肉衰退，随着衰老而带来的肌肉减少。

Low grip strength has been linked to longer hospital stays, and in a study of hospitalized cancer patients, it was linked to a “an approximate 3-fold decrease in probability of discharge alive.”

握力不足意味着更长的与医院打交道的时间，在一个关于住院的癌症患者的研究中，它与”能够健康出院“有大约3倍下降概率的相关性。

In older subjects, lower grip strength has even been linked with declines in cognitive performance.

在一个过去的研究项目中，握力不足甚至和认知能力下降联系在一起。