A long-term health study of citizens of Framingham, Massachusetts started in the 1940s helped lead to the determination of key risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Most of what is now common knowledge about heart disease comes from this Framingham Heart Study. But researchers have looked at tangential data collected in the study to uncover that recent revisiting of the data suggests that health is also influenced by the people around us.
As a part of studying the health of over 5,000 people from Framingham, researchers asked participants for names of their family members, close friends and colleagues, in order to be able to track the participants’ health long-term and find them in the case of moves, death or other life changes. While not the goal, this data provided deep insight into the social network of the town over decades. And, looking at that data, researchers earlier this decade observed that health conditions were more prevalent among people who knew each other.
For example, if someone became obese, the likelihood that someone they were connected to would become obese increased by 171%. In the early 70s, 65% of Framingham residents in their 40s were regular smokers; this dropped to 22% by 2001. And, as the researchers noted, quitters weren’t randomly dispersed throughout the community, but were clustered amongst people in a social network. “People quit together, or they didn’t quit at all,” according to James Fowler of UCSD, one of the doctors who examined the Framingham data.
It’s interesting to think about how we can harness the power of community to influence health in the Web 2.0 version of social networking. It suggests that if we can bring people together and help them make connections, we might be able to encourage positive health behaviors that will see lasting results.
You can read a PDF of the Wired magazine article here
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