The strength of your handshake could indicate how long you will live, according to scientists.

Other pointers to the length of your life are your usual walking speed, how long it takes you to get up from a chair and your capacity to balance on one leg.

As markers of physical health they are simple and cheap to measure. Now scientists have conducted a systematic review of research to assess the extent of their influence on the risk of death.

The findings are based on 33 studies from across the world, which included more than 50,000 men and women who were followed for up to 43 years.

The results show that people with a stronger hand grip and better performance on the other tasks lived substantially longer than their weaker counterparts.

Death rates were 67 per cent higher in people with the weakest grip strength compared with the strongest over the period of the studies, after taking age, sex and body size into account. Average grip strength declines with age and is around 27 kilos for a middle-aged woman and 40 kilos for a middle-aged man. One study showed a 3 per cent reduction in mortality for every kilo increase in grip strength.

Normal walking speed […]