Your handshake can reveal more about you than you might like!

This piece of research may not be music to the ears of those – stereotypically women – who seek to appear younger than they are. New studies have found that your handshake can tell a lot about you, including your age.

Researchers said on Wednesday that the strength of someone's grip may reveal how fast they're ageing, their education level - and even their future health. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis researchers reviewed more than 50 published studies from around the world for their article in the journal PLOS ONE.

They found that people with more education at age 69 tended to grip just as strongly as less educated people at age 65, suggesting the latter were ageing about four years faster. ''According to hand grip strength, people with high education ... feel several years younger compared to people with lower education,'' study author Sergei Scherbov said.

Another study the authors reviewed was done on more than a million Swedish adolescent males, whose handgrip strength was measured as part of an exam for military service. Those with lower handgrip strength were significantly more likely to die earlier, have heart disease, be at higher risk of suicide and experience psychological problems. Differences in health that correlated with handgrip strength could be seen across many of the studies, the researchers said.

''Low handgrip strength has been shown definitively to predict poor outcomes in a wide variety of mortality, morbidity, and other health outcomes,'' said the PLOS ONE study.

However, any educational and racial differences tended to disappear as people reached their 90s.

Warren Sanderson from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna stated that hand-grip strength was a good measure and its data has helped many studies of aging before.

The researchers determined that hand-grip is a corresponding factor to future mortality, cognitive decline, and disability and also the ability to recover at a hospital, stated Sanderson and Serguei Scherbov.

The hand-grip of a 69-year-old white woman who had completed secondary education and that of a 65-year-old white woman who had not completed her secondary education had the same strength. Hence the hand grip suggests that the strength characteristic of the 65-year-old was lower due to lower education.

Experts suggest that physical tests like hand-grip can be used to identify differences in the aging process between population groups that may be otherwise not be obvious.