Good Social Support may add to Longevity

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.”,

Gratitude Can Inspire

You know when you read something and it really hits home? I just read about another study today done on gratitude. I know I just wrote about gratitude and oomph! not to long ago. But, here goes another one. And why not share these studies with everyone you can? I think if everyone expressed gratitude more often, we would be living in a better world.

When I express gratitude to my wife it always is appreciated and can be contagious.

Picking up some flowers. Issuing a compliment. Doing your partner’s chores. All are small acts that provoke gratitude and strengthen relationships, say the authors of a new study.

Researchers studied 65 couples who were in committed, satisfying relationships and tracked the day-to-day fluctuations in relationship satisfaction. The so-called “ups and downs.” The researchers found that feelings of gratitude boost the health of relationships. Both the giver and the receiver of an act of kindness benefit, said the lead author of the study, Sara Algoe, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The emotion of gratitude helps people find and then bond to people who care about their welfare, the study finds.

“Gratitude triggers a cascade of responses within the person who feels it in that very moment, changing the way the person views the generous benefactor, as well as motivations toward the benefactor,” Algoe said in a news release. “This is especially true when a person shows that they care about the partner’s needs and preferences.” The study is published online in the journal Personal Relationships.

This work was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biobehavior Issus in Physical and Mental Health.

And why did I place this blogpost under “inspiration?” Because I do feel gratitude does inspire.