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…