Washington, Oct 6 (Inditop.com) How far you can reach beyond your toes from a sitting position may show how stiff your arteries really are.
Among people 40 years and older, performance on the sit-and-reach test could be used to assess the flexibility of arteries.
Because arterial stiffness often precedes heart disease, the results suggest that this simple test could become a quick measure of one’s risk for early mortality from heart attack or stroke.
“Our findings have potentially important clinical implications because trunk flexibility can be easily evaluated,” said study co-author Kenta Yamamoto. “This simple test might help to prevent age-related arterial stiffening.”
It is not known why arterial flexibility would be related to the flexibility of the body in middle-age and older people, says a release of the American Physiological Society.
But the authors say that one possibility is that stretching exercises may set into motion physiological reactions that slow down age-related arterial stiffening.
These findings were published in the American Journal of Physiology.
