What Your Hands Are Warning You About Your Heart

Almost half of all heart attacks are silent heart attacks, which means there are no warning signs. Fortunately, your hands can reveal heart disease warning signs that could save your life. Discover the key health markers, like weak grip strength or clubbed fingers, that can provide important insight

I want you to make a fist right now and squeeze it as hard as you can. The fist that you just made will tell you more about what’s going on with your heart than even blood pressure does. So, in the next 5 minutes, I’m going to show you seven things about your hands that will give you some indication of what’s going on deeper inside with your cardiovascular system. What you need to know is between 45 and 50% of heart attacks are completely silent. They give absolutely no symptoms whatsoever before you get one.

Even if you have high blood pressure and normal cholesterol, you can still have a heart attack. Even if you have no chest pain, you can still have a heart attack. The first one we’re going to talk about is number one, the grip test, okay? Published in The Lancet in 2015. They found that for every 5 kg, which is 11 lb of grip strength you lose over time, the risk of dying from heart attack increases by 17%.

And this wasn’t just done in one study. It was in several studies. Grip strength beats blood pressure at predicting who will die from heart disease. When’s the last time the doctor ever had you do grip strength? Probably never because they just focus on blood pressure.

But, what’s even more interesting is why grip strength relates to your cardiovascular system. And if you have a grip strength tester and you want to know what number to stay above, for men it’ll be 81 lb or 37 kg. If you’re a female, you want to keep it above 51 lb, which is 24 kg. And if you don’t have a grip strength tester, you can just use another test, opening jars, okay? Do you tend to ask other people to open jars?

Or what about when you shake hands with someone? Do you feel that you can actually give a firm handshake? Or do you feel that it’s a little bit weak? Number two, ring finger lifts off the table. Does the skin in your palm feel ropy or have tension when you try to do this?

This is not really a hand problem. It’s a little warning light from the palm of your hand. They’ve done a review of over 32 studies and found people with that condition are three times more likely to have diabetes and almost three times more likely to have serious liver disease. A 23-year study of over 30,000 people backed it up. And here’s what happens, because when your blood sugar goes high for too long, the extra sugar sticks to proteins in your body and damages them.

That same process also is correlated to what’s going on in the heart. So, if your ring finger does not lie completely flat, you should probably get your blood sugar checked. Also, the heart. If your environment is off, everything else struggles. It’s like a fish tank.

Pollute the water and the fish gets sick. You could feed them the best food, you can treat every single symptom, but if the water stays toxic, nothing recovers. The body runs on 10 signals like insulin, cortisol, inflammation, sleep quality, gut function. Every one of them affects how you feel. But, there is always one signal that is more broken than the rest.

And until you fix that one, everything else stays stuck. a free 2-minute quiz that finds it for you. It tells you which one of the main signals is holding your body back right now. Click the link in the description, take the quiz, and stop guessing. Number three, club nails.

In a normal finger, there’s a clear angle and a nail that meets the skin. But, when you have clubbing, that angle shifts. It kind of bulges out and it looks like the end of a drumstick. It’s a bit of a complexity, but certain things don’t get filtered out by the lungs and it slips through into the tiny vessels that end up on your fingertips, because this is the most peripheral part of your body. Now, they correlated 75% that clubbing comes from your lungs, which could also indirectly come from the heart, but 10 to 15% can come directly from the heart.

If you just noticed it within the last 6 months, then you should probably go get things checked. All right, number four is white nails. The nail bed should normally have a pink color to it. It just so happens when the heart doesn’t work right, the nail becomes white or cloudy. Now, just as a side note, there’s this patient named Robert.

Robert was 54, construction worker his whole life, came to my office not for a heart problem, just for a hand problem. He had this contracture in his finger, and he’s like, “What do I do to get it corrected? ” He thought maybe I could do some manipulation or whatever to try to fix it. I looked at his nails, okay? He didn’t have the club nails, but they definitely looked cloudy and white.

I did go through his history, and yes, he had a history of eating a lot of refined sugar and carbohydrates. And so, I asked him about his A1C, and that was definitely on the high side. So, he was going right towards diabetes. He wasn’t a full diabetic, he was a pre-diabetic. But, there’s something about this case I just didn’t feel comfortable with, so I sent him to the doctor.

He came back to see me. I was in touch with his doctor. We worked together on this case. I worked on his nutrition and his sleep and his exercise, and eventually his EKG and his heart tests actually did much better. But, the contracture never changed.

I think there was just too much scar tissue. Because if I just jumped in there and started working on his finger and ignored everything else, who knows what could have happened. Number five is yellow bumps on the cords of the tendons in the back of the hand. So, when you look in the back of the hand and you extend your fingers, you’ll see these little tendons that go from your fingers to your wrist. If you see these little firm yellow bumps on the cords, suspect there could be something going on with cholesterol, okay?

Sometimes cholesterol will build up on these tendons and show up with people that have more genetic tendency to have high cholesterol. I read a study with over 951 people, they correlated it with a 36. 7% increase in the rate of heart attacks. And by the way, if you’re a female over 51, that risk just jumps up 17 times higher. So, by the time you see these little bumps in the back of your hand, there could potentially be issues with the heart going on.

You don’t want to just get a cholesterol test, you want to get an advanced lipid profile test and really dial in on the particle size because you don’t want to have higher numbers of the small dense, okay? That’s a problem. All right, number six, fine tremors. If there’s a tiny, fast quiver, not a shaking, but a fine fast tremor in both hands at once, then there could potentially be a problem. About 75% of people with an overactive thyroid have this.

The thyroid tremor comes with hands that are warm and slightly damp at the same time. And just to make this simple, if you do have tremors in both of your hands, you should just check your thyroid just to make sure because sometimes it’s a little bit hard to differentiate. So, a lot of people ask me, what supplements do I recommend? Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you’ll find more information.

All right, number seven, cold hands. I know a lot of people say, well, if you have cold hands, you have poor circulation. Not necessarily. That’s not a circulation problem because that has something to do with the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system, the flight or fight response, and that can affect circulation, especially with the heart. So, if you’re cold all the time despite stress, despite anything, it’s probably not heart related, but if stress activates the cold, then we n