IN a way it all seems so obvious. Your friend found a lump in her breast, so you have that long-delayed mammogram. One by one your friends stop smoking, so you stop, too. Of course people are affected by their friends’ habits and their health.
But what seems obvious in the abstract can lead to surprising findings. A recent study found that obesity can spread from friend to friend much like a virus. When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too.
The study, published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine,
involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people
who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003.
Now, scientists believe that social networks not only can spread diseases, like the common cold,
but also may influence many types of behavior — negative and positive —
which then affect an individual’s health, as well as a community’s.
“In the past few years we have been seeing a network revolution,” says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physics professor at the University of Notre Dame.
“People sensed that networks were out there, but they never had large
enough data sets to start understanding them in a quantitative fashion.”
For
example, he said, sociologists would go into a classroom and ask
students to list their friends. That, he said, can be useful, but
social networks are huge, and they evolve over time. They involve you,
your family, your friends, your friends’ friends and your friends’
friends’ friends.
Obesity - Smoking - Depression - Friends - Eating Disorders - Medicine and Health - New York Times
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