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 in 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 in a telephone interview.
Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine
social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148
studies that covered more than 308,000 people for their analysis,
published in 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 in
the number of Americans who report having no confidant,” they
added. “Such findings suggest that despite increases in 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)
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