Kim David A, Benjamin Emelia J, Fowler James H, Christakis Nicholas A
Department of Emergency Medicine, Stanford University, 300 Pasteur Drive MC 5119, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute & Boston University's Framingham Heart Study, 73 Mount Wayte Avenue, Framingham, MA 01702, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2016 Aug 31;283(1837). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0958.
Socially isolated individuals face elevated rates of illness and death. Conventional measures of social connectedness reflect an individual's perceived network and can be subject to bias and variation in reporting. In this study of a large human social network, we find that greater indegree, a sociocentric measure of friendship and familial ties identified by a subject's social connections rather than by the subject, predicts significantly lower concentrations of fibrinogen (a biomarker of inflammation and cardiac risk), after adjusting for demographics, education, medical history and known predictors of cardiac risk. The association between fibrinogen and social isolation, as measured by low indegree, is comparable to the effect of smoking, and greater than that of low education, a conventional measure of socioeconomic disadvantage. By contrast, outdegree, which reflects an individual's perceived connectedness, displays a significantly weaker association with fibrinogen concentrations.
社会孤立的个体面临更高的疾病和死亡风险。传统的社会联系衡量指标反映的是个体对自身社交网络的认知，可能存在报告偏差和差异。在这项针对大型人类社交网络的研究中，我们发现，入度较高（一种以社会为中心衡量友谊和家庭关系的指标，由受试者的社会关系而非受试者自身确定）在调整了人口统计学、教育程度、病史以及已知的心脏风险预测因素后，预示着纤维蛋白原（一种炎症和心脏风险的生物标志物）的浓度显著降低。以低入度衡量的纤维蛋白原与社会孤立之间的关联，与吸烟的影响相当，且大于低教育程度（社会经济劣势的传统衡量指标）的影响。相比之下，反映个体自我认知的社交联系的出度，与纤维蛋白原浓度的关联则显著较弱。
