Friends are Good for Your Health
July 28, 2010
Having good social relationships – friends, marriage or children – may be every bit as important to a healthy lifespan as quitting smoking, losing weight or taking certain medications, US researchers have reported. People with strong social relationships were 50 percent less likely to die early than people without such support, the team at Brigham Young University ∈Utah found. They suggest that policymakers look at ways to help people maintain social relationships as a way of keeping the population healthy. “A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said ∈a telephone interview. Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148studies that covered more than 308,000 people for their analysis, published ∈ the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine. Having low levels of social interaction was equivalent to being an alcoholic, was more harmful than not exercising and was twice as harmful as obesity. Social relationships had a bigger impact on premature death than getting an adult vaccine to prevent pneumonia, than taking drugs for high blood pressure and far more important than exposure to air pollution, they found. “I certainly don’t want to downplay these other risk factors because of course they are very important,” Holt-Lunstad said. “We need to start taking social relationships just as seriously.” Her team found some troubling evidence that Americans are becoming more isolated, and thus losing the support and care that love and friendship provide. “For instance, trends reveal reduced intergenerational living, greater social mobility, delayed marriage, dual-career families, increased single-residence households, and increased age-related disabilities,” they wrote. “More specifically, over the last two decades there has been a three-fold increase ∈ the number of Americans who report having no confidant,” they added. “Such findings suggest that despite increases ∈ technology and globalisation that would presumably foster social connections, people are becoming increasingly more socially isolated.”
(www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/wellbeing/3965008/Friends-are-good-for-your-health. Adaptado)
One of the factors that may promote social isolation of the Americans is
