The use of fitness testing for the identification of women at high-risk of metabolic syndrome (MS), and therefore of cardiovascular disease, is clinically relevant.

The purpose of this study was to determine the ability of a set of physical fitness tests to establish the risk of MS in perimenopausal Moroccan women.

The study comprised 151 women (45–65 years) from the North of Morocco. We used standardized field-based fitness tests to assess cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular strength, flexibility and balance. Fatness was assessed by impedanciometry and anthropometry. We also measured resting heart rate, blood pressure and plasma fasting glucose, total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol and triglycerides.

Women with MS performed worse in most of the fitness tests studied. Among the fitness test studied, the six-minute walk test was the most associated to MS. Receiver operating characteristics curve analyses revealed that the six-minute walk test threshold that best discriminated between the presence and absence of MS was 480.5 m (area under curve (AUC): 0.719, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.62–0.82; p<0.001). Logistic regression after adjustment for age and weight showed that a distance ≤480 m is associated with 2.9 times higher risk (95% CI: 1.56–7.65; p<0.05) for having MS.

Including cardiorespiratory fitness as a MS risk factor may improve early identification of at-risk Moroccan women. Fitness testing provides useful information and is cheap, easy to perform, and not time-consuming, which makes its use in this specific clinical settings feasible.