Small Social circles doubles risk of death for women with heart diseases
Dec 5
[Health India]: Washington, Dec 5 : A new study by researchers at the San Diego Healthcare System, has found that
women who suffer from coronary artery disease and have small social networks die at twice the rate of those who have a larger circle of social contacts.
According to the study, women who had more social contacts and saw them more often also had lower blood glucose and blood pressure levels, lower rates of smoking and other factors that reduced their risk for coronary disease. Women with larger social networks also showed fewer signs of artery blockage during the four-year study.
It was also found that social isolation’s effect on heart health might have more to do with differences in income than anything else. The researchers studied 503 older women, and found that annual income was statistically more important than social network size for predicting coronary disease death rates. Women with small social networks were also much more likely to make less than 20,000 dollars a year, they discovered.
“The overall magnitude of the social network effect rivalled or exceeded that of more commonly considered biomedical risk factors including smoking, diabetes and hypertension histories,” the researchers wrote in their study. (ANI)
