Objectives: To assess the prevalence of handgrip weakness in diverse international populations of older adults; to identify handgrip strength (HS) cut points for increased likelihood for slowness in gait. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of International Mobility in Aging Study: 1552 communitydwelling older adults, between 65 to 74 years, who completed HS and gait speed assessment, were included. We used the baseline data from 2 Latin American (Manizales, Columbia and Natal, Brazil) and 2

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... American (Kingston, Ontario and Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec) cities. Weakness was defined according to sex-specific cut points associated with slowness proposed by Alley et al.(2014) in the recent Foundation for NIH collaborative project on sarcopenia. Slowness was defined as gait speed < 0.8m/s. Classification Regression Tree (CART) methodology was used to identify cut points that distinguished weakness associated with slowness. Results: Weakness prevalence in women using criteria proposed by the FNIH sarcopenia project was 10.4% (Kingston), 4.3% (Saint-Hyacinthe), 17.3% (Manizales) and 39.1% (Natal). The weakness prevalence for men was 3.8% (Kingston), 1.6% (Saint-Hyacinthe), 19.7% (Manizales) and 23.4% (Natal). Using CART methodology we found that HS cut point associated with slowness for women in Kingston was <16 kg, Saint-Hyacinthe <18Kg, Manizales <21 Kg, Natal <16 Kg. In both Latin American sites, HS cut point for men was <26 Kg. Canadian men had higher values (Saint-Hyacinthe <39 Kg; Kingston <43 Kg). Conclusion: Large differences in weakness prevalence and handgrip cut points for slowness were observed across cities. Our results suggest that HS cut points indicative of slowness could be populationspecific.