Easy flexibility test claims to predict how long someone will live and the results are shocking

Researchers think they have discovered a way to determine how long someone might live for using one key factor.

Of course it's worth including a caveat here that there are any number of factors which can impact on how long each of us has before we kick the bucket.

It could be lifestyle - this factor is unlikely to help if you smoke 20 cigarettes a day, live off junk food, and never exercise.

Researchers found a correlation in their test subjects. (Mireya Acierto / Getty)

Genetics are also important, you could be the fittest person around but if you have a genetic predisposition to cancer then well, bad luck, unfortunately.

Nonetheless researchers in Brazil have found one thing which could be a strong indicator of someone's life expectancy - just remember that all the other health factors also still apply here.

There are already ways to measure an individual's risk of certain conditions which come with their own benefits and flaws.

For example, Body Mass Index doesn't account for things like high muscle mass or pre-existing conditions.

Now however researchers have come up with another index - the 'Flexindex'. Catchy!

Flexibility could be an indicator of life expectancy. (Olga Rolenko / Getty)

If you hadn't already guessed, this is a way to measure someone's joint mobility and what that might say about general health.

Brazilian researchers assessed the joint mobility score, the 'Flexindex', of a group of 3,100 healthy middle-aged adults.

People in the group were asked to carry out a series of 20 different movements.

Sports medicine physician and study author Dr. Claudio Gil S. Araújo said: “Being aerobically fit and strong and having good balance have been previously associated with low mortality. We were able to show that reduced body flexibility is also related to poor survival in middle-aged men and women."

Doing regular stretches is a great way to maintain flexibility. (Harbucks / Getty)

He added: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cohort study to show that a reduced level of body flexibility … is related to higher mortality in a large middle-aged cohort of men and women."

Scientists kept up with study participants over the course of around 13 years, during which time almost 10 percent of them, around 300 people, died.

And in those that were still alive at the end of the study, they found that the flexibility scores were almost 10 percent higher than in those who died.

This meant that the study found that participants who had a lower score on the flexindex were at an increased risk of dying.

That's dying during the study though, not dying overall - the risk of dying in general remains at a solid 100 percent for all of us.

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