Is new health policy encouraging friendships?

People with strong social relationships were 50 percent less likely to die early than people without such support, the team at Brigham Young University in Utah found.

They suggest that policymakers look at ways to help people maintain social relationships as a way of keeping the population healthy.

“A lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Her team conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examine social relationships and their effects on health. They looked at 148 studies that covered more than 308,000 people for their analysis, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org.

Having low levels of social interaction was equivalent to being an alcoholic, was more harmful than not exercising and was twice as harmful as obesity.

Social relationships had a bigger impact on premature death than getting an adult vaccine to prevent pneumonia, than taking drugs for high blood pressure and far more important than exposure to air pollution, they found.

“I certainly don't want to downplay these other risk factors because of course they are very important,” Holt-Lunstad said. “We need to start taking social relationships just as seriously.”

Government policies to encourage social relationships will not necessarily be easy, Holt-Lundstad said. “Air pollution and the clean air act — that is simple policy,” she said.

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