Latest Study Confirms Your Friendships Can Affect Your Health

Friendships are important, that goes without saying. Having friends isn’t only beneficial for your social life and friends do way more than hearing about your love life or going out with you. Believe it or not, friendships have a tremendous potential to affect your health. Is their impact on our health positive or negative? Keep reading to find out!

How do friendships affect our health?
The relationship between friendship and mortality has been studied for more than twenty years. Unfortunately, there are still more questions than answers about this subject, particularly the impact on friendship on a person’s health. Yang Claire Yang and a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina conducted a study to inspect the subject in a greater detail. In fact, this is the first study to identify the definitive link between social connections and overall health.

Red More: Love and Relationships

For the purpose of the study, scientists combined data from four large, nationally representative, population-based, contemporary researches implementing an innovative longitudinal life course design. These four surveys included more than 14,000 people from adolescence to old age. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA published the results of the study, which confirm that social integration is associated with better physiological functioning and decreased risks of physical disorders in a dose-response manner across life stage samples.

Below, you can see the key findings from this study:

• Social integration protects health and promotes longevity
• The links between social embeddedness and better physical functioning as well as lower disease risks are particularly strong across most biological markers examined
• Psychosocial distress may arise from negative social exchanges
• Social integration is exceptionally important for health during the formative years of building social relationships in adolescence as well as in later adult years
• Being socially isolated in adolescence has the same effect as being physically inactive, and causes inflammation
• Social integration in adolescence is beneficial for young adult metabolic and cardiovascular health
• Early relationship contexts and connections play a major role in predisease pathways into adulthood

That’s not all; the study also found that socially embedded older adults experience fewer disease risks e.g. social connections have a significant role in reducing hypertension (high blood pressure) and obesity. On the other hand, alienating from others increases risk for heart diseases including diabetes.

Surprisingly, even though healthy social connections are important for health of adolescents and older adults, the same connection wasn’t discovered in middle-aged individuals. A possible explanation for this strange finding could be the fact that middle-aged adults are already embedded in multiple social networks associated with this life stage such as community, work, children, and so on.

There’s more

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that one’s social integration affects the likelihood of getting some disease. For instance, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the study that assessed the extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a potential factor contributing to the increased rates of obese individuals. The study included 12,067 participants who were followed for 32 years.

The findings showed that a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by staggering 57% of he/she had a friend who became obese in a specific interval. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that obesity may spread through social networks in a quantifiable and discernible pattern which depends on the nature of social ties. Although obesity of a neighbor or any other individual with whom a person doesn’t socialize doesn’t contribute to the risk of becoming obese, the story is much different for friends and siblings. Furthermore, pairs of friends and siblings of the same sex have more influence on the weight gain, than friends or siblings of the opposite sex.

Additionally, a person’s risk of committing suicide increases by four times if he/she has a friend who has tried to kill themselves, according to a study published in the British Journal of Preventive & Social Medicine.

As you can see, social integration plays an important role in an individual’s physical and emotional health. Friendships have a meaningful impact on a bad smoking habit, as well. The New England Journal of Medicine featured a study which revealed that a person-to-person spread of smoking cessation appears to have been a factor in a population-level decline in smoking. If your friend stops smoking, you have 36% decreased chances of smoking yourself.

Conclusion
Friendship and social integration have a major impact on every individual. There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that a person’s social connections could benefit his/her physical and emotional health. On the other hand, social alienation increases risk of various diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, even obesity. Friends with healthy lifestyle inspire us to do the same. Plus, having someone to talk to when the chips are down, allows us to de-stress and reduce the risk of anxiety and depression.

References
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/3/578.full#aff-1
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3710802/Christakis_SpreadofObesity.pdf?sequence=2