Vital Capacity and Timed Vital Capacity in Normal Men Over Forty

¹ From the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts

The vital capacity and the 1-second timed vital capacity were measured on 428 healthy men between the ages of 40 and 88 who were living in a rural area of Massachusetts and who came voluntarily for a health examination. These measurements were studied in relation to age, height and weight. A new formula was calculated for predicting the vital capacity from age and height as follows: VC (in liters) = –2.418 + 0.0465 (ht. in cm) – 0.0292 (age in yr.). This formula was found to give more accurate predictions of vital capacity than one in common use. It has been used to construct a nomogram from which the predicted vital capacity of men of known height and over the age of 20 may be read. The mean 1-second timed vital capacity was found to be 79.1%, S.D. 7.2. The results indicated that for practical purposes the 1-second timed vital capacity may be regarded as independent of age, height and weight at the ages studied.