We all know that it’s important to have friends. Whether you need someone to talk to, need some help, or even just someone to gossip with, friends are always welcome. What we didn’t know up until this recent study from the University of North Carolina is exactly how important are friends for your health?
- The study author, Kathleen Mullan Harris is a James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina
- Researchers based their study on data collected from 4 different longitudinal studies
- Isolated teens can present as much inflammation as if they skipped a workout
- The study looked at social relationships in various stages of a human’s life
- More social activity was undeniably linked to an overall better health
The study looked at 4 different studies, with participants ranging from 863 to 7,889, in order to figure out what exactly is different between socially active teens and loners.
Kathleen Mullan Harris and her team of researchers claimed that they were expecting social activity to be important, but not as important as they found it to be.
When the team correlated the social relationships of teenagers and linked them to the adolescents’ health levels, they relied on 4 separate factors for more accuracy – abdominal fat, blood pressure, body mass index, and something called the C-reactive protein.
The C-reactive protein is, of course, a protein, which is used as a measure for inflammation; the inflammation levels are what is used to indicate chronic levels of stress hormones.
Not only did the tests show that all of the factors were influenced by being lonely, with socially active people showing noticeably decreased levels, but loneliness was associated with poorer overall health and an overall increased death rate.
The researchers continued by finding out more about the relationship between socializing and health in other age groups.
When talking about middle aged people, the results of the study showed that they do not beneficiate as much from having healthy social relationships, but their health does take a dive if presented with multiple stressful relationships.
In this case, the researchers recommend getting rid of unhealthy relationships.
The last age group for which the studies produced results are the elderly; those senior citizens in touch with their loved ones and their community showed a very decreased level of hypertension and obesity.
With the studies being observational meta analyses, exact cause-effect relationships were not discerned; however, the researchers are quite sure that everything ties in to stress levels, as an increased level of stress can indeed lead to all of the aforementioned results.
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