Over the years I have read that it’s important to have good quality relationships with friends, family and your community. Now there is an exhaustive report (out this past July) that simply confirms that notion. 

People with adequate social relationships friends, family and community involvement were 50% less likely to die during study periods than those with sparse social support, the authors found. It’s an effect comparable to that of quitting smoking.

Wow! And there is more!

People with little social support have a mortality risk equal to alcoholism and even higher than either obesity or physical inactivity, the study found. I think these are stunning conclusions!

Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, compiled data from 148 studies. More than 300,000 people were in the data pool, followed for an average of 7.5 years. The link between social support and mortality risk was found for men and women of all ages, regardless of initial health condition, years of a study or cause of death.

 In concrete terms, that 50% number means that socially connected people would live an average of 3.7 years longer than less-connected people, says study co-author Timothy B. Smith, a psychology professor at Brigham Young.

Of course, the 50% survival edge is not an absolute number. This number was an average across results from all the studies pooled together, says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young and lead author of the review, which was published in the Journal PLoS Medicine.

Some studies measured social connectedness in simple ways, such as whether a person lived alone. Others used complex measures, such as tallying how many people were included in a person’s social network, the extent to which people were involved in a community, a person’s perceived degree of loneliness and the extent to which people felt they made a contribution.

The study is “very telling,” says Dr. Antonio Gomez, assistant clinical professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at UC San Francisco. Physicians and the public should take note, he says. But it’s still not clear what the practical implications are for improving people’s health.

The studies, Gomez notes, have their limitations, primarily the trickiness of teasing out cause and effect. Does social connectedness foster good health or are people in good health simply more likely to be socially connected? “We can’t make the broad, sweeping claim that social relationships cause increased survivability, at least, not yet,” he says. 

Gomez adds that the studies don’t explain how social contacts could drive good health. And they don’t rule out the possibility of unknown differences that may exist between people who are social and those who are not, and that those differences, not the social links that ride along with them, could be the real things driving health outcomes.

Yet there is mounting evidence in the scientific literature that social relationships do affect health. 

In an earlier study by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, professor of psychiatry at Ohio State University, medical students who described themselves as lonely had poorer immune responses than their colleagues who described themselves as less lonely. 

”As humans, we have many different regulatory systems, blood pressure, metabolism, stress hormones,” says Teresa Ellen Seeman, professor of medicine at the UCLA School of Public Health. “There are data that suggest all these systems are affected by social relationships.

People who report more supportive and positive social relationships have lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol levels, better glucose metabolism and lower levels of various stress hormones.”

To study the effect of social support on blood pressure, which is a predictor of cardiovascular disease, Bert Uchino, psychology professor at the University of Utah, put a portable blood pressure cuff on study subjects, monitoring their blood pressure throughout the day.

During the study period, subjects also filled out diaries. Those who recorded feeling more loved and cared for had lower blood pressures than those who recorded feeling lower levels of support.

 “Friends and supportive people can make life easier on a basic, everyday level,” Uchino says. “They can lend you money, offer rides or provide baby-sitting. They can also encourage you to have better health practices, see a doctor, exercise more. They may also help you indirectly by making you feel you have something to live for. A good example is a new parent. You might want to take better care of yourself so you can see your daughter graduate from high school.

“

The emotional support people receive from friends and loved ones “can help you think about problems in ways that decrease their [perceived] severity or even make them non-problems,” Uchino adds. “By having a secure relationship and feeling loved, people live much more secure, calm lives.”,

An article I read last month by Jeannie Stein of the Los Angeles Times, describes some negative effects of watching TV. I have noticed myself that the more I find time for some form of exercise, the less time I have for watching television and it looks like that is a good thing.

Watching television for hour upon hour obviously isn’t the best way to spend leisure time. Inactivity has been linked to obesity and heart disease. But a new study quantifies TV viewing’s effect on risk of death.

Researchers found that each hour a day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, an 11% greater risk of all causes of death, and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer.

As the article stated, researchers found a statistical relationship between long hours of TV viewing and a shortened life span, but the study did not go so far as to find a direct cause.

A journal of the American Heart Assn., looked at health data among 8,800 men and women older than 25 who were part of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study. Participants recorded their television viewing hours for a week, and researchers separated the results by amount of viewing: those who watched less than two hours of TV a day, those who watched two to four hours a day, and those who watched more than four hours a day.

Researchers found a strong connection between TV hours and death from cardiovascular disease, not just among the overweight and obese, but among people who had a healthy weight and exercised.

“What we showed was that irrespective of a person’s exercise level, sitting for four or more hours watching television was linked to a significant increase in risk of death compared to watching lower amounts of TV,” said Dr. David Dunstan, lead author of the study and professor and head of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia. “The message here is that in addition to promoting regular exercise, we also need to promote avoiding long periods of sitting, such as spending long hours in front of the computer screen.”

To him, the results weren’t unexpected. “When we’re in that sitting posture, we’re not using our muscles, and we know from extensive evidence that muscle contractions are important for the body’s regulatory processes, such as the ability to break down glucose and use it as energy.”

Dr. Prediman K. Shah, director of the cardiology division of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, agreed. He pointed out that muscles become deconditioned when not used, triggering harmful physiological changes. “If your activity is slowing down, you metabolize cholesterol less and synthesize it more,” he said.

Even sporadic exercisers who sit for long periods need to increase their daily activity.

“The physical activity we do over a 24-hour period is important,” says Dr. Gerald F. Fletcher, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., and a spokesman for the American Heart Assn.

That means taking the stairs instead of the elevator, gardening, walking the dog . . .

“For couch potatoes, sitting on your duff is hazardous to your health,” Shah said. “The bottom line is keep moving.”

Many of us love blueberries. And now we have another reason to love blueberries even more. A new study suggests that drinking wild blueberry juice daily may have the potential benefits of enhancing the memory of those at the risk of dementia and other age-related neurodegenerative diseases.

Although there has been earlier research exhibiting that blueberries can improve memory in mice, this is the first time that research was conducted to demonstrate a similar effect in human beings. Robert Krikorian, psychiatrist at the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Centre, one of the authors of the study stated, “The ultimate goal is to find ways to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease.” He added, “These preliminary memory findings are encouraging and suggest that consistent supplementation with blueberries may offer an approach to forestall or mitigate neurodegeneration.”

The researchers conducted a study to establish whether blueberry can help in keeping the mind sharper in those with failing memory. The investigators divided 16 participants, who showed signs of “early memory changes,” into two groups. All those recruited were in their 70’s. Nine of the subjects were asked to drink two or more cups of blueberry juice daily for two months while the remaining seven forming the control group drank a sweet placebo beverage minus the blueberry juice.

During the course of the study, the participants were closely monitored for adherence as well as any side effects. At the close of the study the subjects were once again tested on their cognitive abilities, learning skills and recall performance.

Observations by researchers:

The scientists noted that after 12 weeks, the subjects consuming blueberry juice exhibited a marked improvement in the learning and memory tests as opposed to those in the control group. In addition, the researchers observed a decline in symptoms of depression and lower glucose levels in the wild blueberry drinkers.

However, the researchers felt that there was need for more study to understand the health implications involved before confirming the results. “The important thing is that there are things people can do to prevent dementia, with little or no side effects,” said Krikorian.

Blueberries are rich in valuable nutrients, low in sugar, are healthy and have a great taste. They contain a host of wonderful ingredients from phytochemicals to vitamin C, potassium, iron, fiber and antioxidants. The properties found in blueberries have been linked to lowering cholesterol levels, encouraging heart health, protecting the body against certain types of cancers, promoting healthy aging, reducing inflammation and cataracts.

Go figure. Like I need anymore reason to love blueberries.

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