• Posted July 1, 2025

Grip Provides Insight Into Psychosis, Study Says

“Get a grip” might be a truer saying for holding onto sanity than previously thought, a new study says.

A loss of grip strength might be an early sign of psychosis, researchers report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

People recently diagnosed with psychosis have weaker grip strength compared to folks in good mental and physical health, researchers found.

“Poor grip strength has been associated with many negative outcomes in a variety of people: lower well-being, higher risk of mortality, poor day-to-day functioning, poor quality of life,” senior researcher Alexandra Moussa-Tooks, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, said in a news release.

“Grip strength seems to capture that things are not going well, but it hasn’t been well studied in relation to brain function or early psychosis,” she continued.

Psychosis often begins with disturbances in the way people move their bodies, before progressing to delusions like paranoia or hallucinations, researchers said in background notes.

For the new study, researchers compared 89 people diagnosed with psychosis within past five years to 51 healthy people.

People with psychosis had lower grip strength and scored worse on well-being assessments, when compared to the control group, researchers found.

Brain scans showed that these problems were related to three key brain regions connected to the default mode network, a brain system that engages when people are daydreaming or not focused on any particular task.

Higher grip strength and greater well-being were associated with greater connectivity among the three brain regions – the anterior cingulate cortex, sensorimotor cortex and cerebellum, results show.

These results suggest that impairment in grip strength might reflect changes in what researchers call “resting-state functional connectivity,” a measure of brain network function, researchers said.

“Our findings are particularly exciting because they identify potential brain targets for new treatments for psychosis,” lead researcher Dr. Heather Burrell Ward, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., said in a news release.

For example, magnetic stimulation might be used to increase that connectivity, researchers said. Another approach could involve physical exercise, which might indirectly strengthen the brain networks.

“If psychosis is a house on fire, symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations are the smoke,” Moussa-Tooks said. “In a fire you don’t target the smoke, you target the fire and its source. And yet, currently that’s not how we approach treatment for psychosis.”

She said motor disturbances help get researchers closer to identifying where the fire may have started and spread.

"They are more fundamental in the sense that they’re easier to link to different disturbances in the brain,” Moussa-Tooks said.

Grip strength also might be used as an early screening tool for psychosis or other types of mental illness, researchers added.

“Grip strength and other motor functions are easily assessed and more readily interpretable than complex tasks often used to study psychosis,” Moussa-Tooks said. “Our work is showing that these seemingly simple metrics can help us understanding disturbances not only in the motor system, but across complex brain systems that give rise to the complex symptoms we see in psychosis.” 

More information

The National Institute of Mental Health has more on psychosis.

SOURCE: Indiana University, news release, June 25, 2025