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Mensen met veel vrienden hebben veel minder hartproblemen.*
Men who have many friends they
can turn to for support are significantly less likely to develop heart disease,
findings from a new study show.
A group of Swedish
investigators found that men with the most social support were about half as
likely to develop heart disease as men who had the least social support.
Study author Dr. Annika
Rosengren told that these results likely apply to women, as well, since previous
research has shown that, among women with heart problems, those who have few
quality friends they see on a regular basis tend to have more widespread disease
than others.
Although these findings are
compelling, the reason why having close friends and staying connected to them
might help people's hearts remains a mystery, Rosengren said.
Consequently, the best thing
people can do to keep their hearts healthy is still to stop smoking, eat well
and get good exercise, the researcher added. "It is unknown whether it
would help to get new friends," said Rosengren, who is based at the
Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
During the study, Rosengren
and colleagues followed 741 50-year-old men for 15 years, recording their levels
of social support and who developed heart disease.
The researchers found that men
who showed the highest levels of social integration - meaning they had many
quality friends whom they saw on a regular basis - were only 45 percent as
likely as men with the least social integration to have heart disease.
Similarly, for men who had the
most friends to lean on when needed - a factor known as emotional attachment -
the odds of developing heart disease were only 58 percent as high as for men
with the least amount of emotional attachment.
Men with more or less social
support showed no differences in smoking, exercise habits, body weight, blood
pressure and other standard risk factors for heart disease. Also, stress and
having a so- called "blue collar" job appeared to have no influence on
men's risk of heart problems, according to the European Heart Journal report.
Rosengren noted that further
studies are needed to determine why social support appears to influence heart
disease, and to investigate the role of other psychological factors such as
stress.
SOURCE: European Heart Journal, January 2004