Breast cancer patients with a wide circle of friends and
relatives are 38 per cent less likely to die within a decade of
being diagnosed than those with few friends and less close-knit
families, found American researchers. Candyce Kroenke, a
research scientist at American health firm Kaiser Permanente,
said: “We found that women with small social networks had a
significantly higher risk of mortality than those with large
networks.” She continued: “We also found that when family
relationships were less supportive, community and religious ties
were critical to survival. “This suggests that both the quality
of relationships, rather than just the size of the network,
matters to survival, and that community relationships matter
when relationships with friends and family are less supportive.”
She and colleagues studied 2,264 women diagnosed with invasive
early-stage breast cancer between 1997 and 2000, and followed
their health for an average of 10.8 years. Their report is
published in the journal Breast Cancer Res