Recipe for Longevity: No Smoking, Lots of Friends
by ilene - August 1st, 2010 12:41 pm
In case you’re wondering, like I was, whether the meta-analysis excluded suicides, it did. – Ilene
We included in the meta-analysis studies that provided quantitative data regarding individuals’ mortality as a function of social relationships, including both structural and functional aspects. Because we were interested in the impact of social relationships on disease, we excluded studies in which mortality was a result of suicide or injury. Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review
Recipe for Longevity: No Smoking, Lots of Friends
By Laura Blue, courtesy of TIME

A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine.
Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships — every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world — and found that those with poor social connections had on average 50% higher odds of death in the study’s follow-up period (an average of 7.5 years) than people with more robust social ties.
That boost in longevity is about as large as the mortality difference observed between smokers and nonsmokers, the study’s authors say. And it’s larger than differences in the risk of death associated with many other well-known lifestyle factors, including lack of exercise and obesity. "This is not just a few studies here and there," says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, lead author on the review and an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. "I’m hoping there will be recognition from the medical community, the public-health community and even the general public about the importance of this."
The friend effect did not appear to vary by sex or by age, with men and women of…
Swine Flu Vaccine: Watching For Side Effects
by ilene - September 27th, 2009 3:37 pm
The decision regarding whether or not to get vaccinated for swine flu, or have your kids vaccinated, may be easy for some, but is not for others. It depends on how you perceive and value the risks. As is often the case with medical interventions, the risks are not fully known or understood. Even if you’re lucky enough to believe you’ve obtained valid risk percentages to compare, you cannot truly know whether your assumptions accurately reflect reality. And your numbers certainly don’t factor in the unknown.
So as the swine flu vaccine program gets underway, several government-sponsored projects will attempt to determine how safe the vaccine really is. We have a rather unique opportunity to learn a lot more while serving as subjects in this grand experiment.
Go ahead, leave comments and share your thoughts… – Ilene
Swine Flu Vaccine: Watching For Side Effects
(WASHINGTON) — More than 3,000 people a day have a heart attack. If you’re one of them the day after your swine flu shot, will you worry the vaccine was to blame and not the more likely culprit, all those burgers and fries?
The government is starting an unprecedented system to track possible side effects as mass flu vaccinations begin next month. The idea is to detect any rare but real problems quickly, and explain the inevitable coincidences that are sure to cause some false alarms.
"Every day, bad things happen to people. When you vaccinate a lot of people in a short period of time, some of those things are going to happen to some people by chance alone," said Dr. Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Health authorities hope to vaccinate well over half the population in just a few months against swine flu, which doctors call the 2009 H1N1 strain. That would be a feat. No more than 100 million Americans usually get vaccinated against regular winter flu, and never in such a short period.
How many will race for the vaccine depends partly on confidence in its safety. The last mass inoculations against a different swine flu, in 1976, were marred by reports of a rare paralyzing condition, Guillain-Barre syndrome.
"The recurring question is, ‘How…
Social Mood, Stocks and Epidemics
by ilene - May 14th, 2009 11:19 am
As we’ve discussed previously (e.g., Global Unrest Continues to Grow, Hyperinflation First, Then Global War), socionomics is premised on the theory that "social mood drives financial, macroeconomic and political behavior, in contrast to the conventional notion that such events drive social mood." Here is an interesting article on socionomics which focuses on social mood and its relationship to disease. – Ilene
Social Mood, Stocks and Epidemics
As you can see in the chart of the MSCI World Stock Index below, there are similarities between the 2003 SARS epidemic and today’s flu outbreak.