FRIDAY, July 30 (HealthDay News) -- Age has an effect on the degree of lumbar flexion and extension that is possible for a woman, as does race on the degree of extension, thus creating a need for new normative values for these categories, according to research published in the July 15 issue of Spine.

Elaine Trudelle-Jackson, P.T., of the Texas Woman's University in Dallas, and colleagues conducted a study of a large group of women, ranging in age from 20 to 83 years, to determine normative values for the extremes of motion (EOM) of lumbar flexion and extension. Values were determined for three age groups (young, 20 to 39; middle, 40 to 59; and old, 60 and older) and by race (African-American and white).

The researchers found that African-American women, as a whole, had a significantly greater degree of extension than white women (60.1 versus 52.6 degrees), but the two races did not significantly differ in degree of flexion. Both flexion EOM and extension EOM declined with age, although the difference in flexion between the middle and older groups was not found to be significant. The authors concluded that different criteria should be used for different racial and age groups when making a lumbar spine mobility assessment.

"Genetic influences as well as environmental and behavioral factors have been proposed as determinants of differences in spinal range of motion between individuals but this has not been investigated in different racial groups. Interestingly, in a study of differences in lumbar ROM in adult male twin pairs, Battie et al found that lumbar flexion ROM variance was primarily determined by genetic influences (64 percent of variance), while lumbar extension was influenced to a greater extent by environmental and behavioral factors," the authors write.

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