Family, Friends Help You Live Longer

Relationships improve your odds of survival by 50 percent

29 July 2010

A new Brigham Young University study suggests social relationships impact a person’s odds of living or dying.

Humans are social animals, and most of us treasure our relationships with family and friends.

An emerging line of research suggests that relationships can keep us healthier. And a new study finds those social connections may also help us live longer.

This new study combined a large number of previous studies and concluded that a lack of social interactions ranks right up with smoking, obesity, and alcoholism as a risk factor for death.

Researchers from Brigham Young University analyzed 148 studies with a total of some 300,000 participants, tracking their social relationships and whether they survived to the end of their particular study, which averaged about seven years.

"Those who scored higher on those measures of social relationships were 50 percent more likely to be alive at that follow-up than people who scored low on those measures," said Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, one of the authors of the study.

She pointed out several ways relationships can affect our health. They can help us cope with stress. They can help us maintain healthy habits like eating well, exercising or seeing a doctor. And there's increasing research that shows a direct but poorly-understood link between relationships and physiological processes in the body.