Reduced Body Flexibility Is Associated With Poor Survival in Middle‐Aged Men and Women: A Prospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Flexibility is recognized as one of the components of physical fitness and commonly included as part of exercise prescriptions for all ages. However, limited data exist regarding the relationship between flexibility and survival. We evaluated the sex-specific nature and magnitude of the associations between body flexibility and natural and non-COVID-19 mortality in a middle-aged cohort of men and women. DESIGN: Prospective cohort study. METHODS: Anthropometric, health and vital data from 3139 (66% men) individuals aged 46-65 years spanning from March 1994 to October 2022 were available. A body flexibility score, termed Flexindex, was derived from a combination of 20 movements (scored 0-4) involving seven different joints, resulting in a score range of 0-80. Kaplan-Meier survival curves were obtained, and unadjusted and adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) for mortality estimated. RESULTS: During a mean follow-up of 12.9 years, 302 individuals (9.6%) comprising 224 men/78 women died. Flexindex was 35% higher in women compared to men (mean ± SD: 41.1 ± 9.4 vs. 30.5 ± 8.7; p < 0.001) and exhibited an inverse relationship with mortality risk in both sexes (p < 0.001). Following adjustment for age, body mass index, and health status, the HR (95% CI) for mortality comparing upper and bottom of distributions of Flexindex were 1.87 (1.50-2.33; p < 0.001) for men and 4.78 (1.23-31.71; p = 0.047) for women. CONCLUSIONS: A component of physical fitness-body flexibility-as assessed by the Flexindex is strongly and inversely associated with natural and non-COVID-19 mortality risk in middle-aged men and women. Future studies should assess whether training-induced flexibility gains are related to longer survival.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".