health

Newswise (a press release service) highlighted a recent study out of the University of Chicago, which suggests that “not having many close friends contributes to poorer health for older adults, those who also feel lonely face even greater health risks and that older people who are able to adjust to being alone don’t have the same health problems.”

The study is the first to examine the relationships between health and two different types of isolation. Researchers measured the degree to which older adults are socially connected and socially active. They also assessed whether older adults feel lonely and whether they expect that friends and family would help them in times of need.

“Social disconnectedness is associated with worse physical health, regardless of whether it prompts feelings of loneliness or a perceived lack of social support,” said study co-author Linda Waite, the Lucy Flower Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on aging.

However, the researchers found a different relationship between social isolation and mental health. “The relationship between social disconnectedness and mental health appears to operate through feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support,” Waite explained.

Older adults who feel most isolated report 65 percent more depressive symptoms than those who feel least isolated, regardless of their actual levels of connectedness. The consequences of poor mental health can be substantial, as deteriorating mental health also reduces people’s willingness to exercise and may increase health-risk behaviors such as cigarette smoking and alcohol use, Waite explained.

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The Irish Times reports today on a new study from Dublin University sociologist Majella McSharry about the potential influence of friends and siblings on body image.

The Irish Times reports:

FRIENDS AND siblings have a far greater influence on how teenagers perceive their body shape than celebrity magazines, according to new research to be published later this week. It also highlights the prevalence of undiagnosed eating disorders.

Sociologist Dr Majella McSharry said the popular press validated the “aesthetic-athletic” body, but it was peers who really determined how teens saw themselves.

About the methods:

She polled 242 students across five second-level schools around Dublin, then conducted in-depth interviews with 30 of them about body image.

“I went out like everybody else thinking that they are going to talk about the media and they did, ultimately that was where they got these ideal images from,” she said. “But where they were actually validated and played out was in the real bodies that they met in day-to-day life, the ones that sat beside them in school, the brothers and sisters they came home to, the parents who fed them. They had much more of an influence on them than just the celebrity bodies.”

Teens were aware of tricks like airbrushing and the kinds of body images used to sell products, said Dr McSharry, who did the research for a doctorate at NUI Maynooth.

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Late last week, the Financial Times (UK) ran a story about how men are more ‘prone to credit crunch blues’ than women in the same situation. The story is focused on men who think they might lose their jobs, who become more depressed and anxious than women. This assessment comes out of a study from Cambridge University sociologist Brendan Burchell. 

The Financial Times reports, 

This anxiety reflected males’ “macho” belief about “men being the breadwinner”, said Brendan Burchell, the Cambridge sociologist who carried out the research. “Men, unlike women, have few positive ways of defining themselves outside of the workplace between when they leave school and when they retire,” he said.

More from Burchell:

The stress and anxiety of people who had become unemployed “bottomed out” after about six months as they adapted to their new circumstances. By contrast, people who had not lost their jobs but thought they might be fired showed steadily worsening mental health for one to two years.

Mr Burchell said: “Given that most economic forecasts predict that the recession will be long with a slow recovery, the results mean that many people – and men in particular – could be entering into a period of prolonged and growing misery.”

Commenting on possible solutions, Mr Burchell stressed the need “to restabilise the City” – adding a mental health angle to the well-rehearsed economic arguments for shoring up the banking system.

Read on…

The Australian paper, The Cannbera Times, ran a story yesterday about a sociologist who suggests that climate change may change some of our most basic hygiene habits. The paper reports that British sociologist Professor Elizabeth Shove says that in 50 years we won’t be showering every day, and maybe even not at all.  Shove notes, ”No, we won’t be dirty, smelly and unhygienic. This kind of social change isn’t about people being forced to give up showers it’s about new habits, new ideas about cleanliness that will become more acceptable, and probably even more popular and enjoyable, than standing under a hot shower.”

About Shove’s work:

Professor Shove, recently awarded a British Economic and Social Council climate change leadership fellowship, is visiting Australia for a lecture series on the challenges of tackling unsustainable consumption.

She has published academic papers on topics as diverse as how casualisation of food is driving house design (bigger kitchens) why the home office is obsolete (wireless connection, laptops and the status of portability) and the colonial origins of our fear of sweat.

In her lecture tour, she is putting a case for governments to send in the sociologists when it comes to giving advice on getting people to switch from over-consumption to greener, more sustainable habits in everyday life.

She said economists and policy wonks don’t understand how systems of social practice, everyday routines and patterns of consumption emerge, persist and disappear.

The sociologist’s take on the shower…

Take the shower, or ”the social history of getting wet every day”, as an illustration of how sociologists differ from economists in their approach to a climate change dilemma. It’s not about bottom lines and price signals.

”What are we really doing when we stand under hot shower? Given the time we spend, the frequency of showering, it can’t really be about getting clean. Is it about privacy, about having a moment to ourselves?” That yearning for privacy, or self-indulgence, may be the seed of a new social habit that will supersede the shower, replacing it with sleek new bathroom designs and desirable cleanliness rituals.

”It’s not a simple picture because you’re also looking at changes in housing design, the emergence of new products, the routines that develop around those changes, and new notions of what we consider to be comfort and cleanliness.”

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Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story on the state of teenage girls in the United States. The article featured the work of sociologist Mike Males, who is fighting the myth that these young women are floundering. Instead, he argues, they are doing better than ever.

Mike Males believes it, and he’s preaching that message to anybody willing to listen. All he needs now is a strong set of fins to propel him upstream. That’s because Males, a sociologist, author and senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, says popular culture prefers to keep tweener and teen girls in familiar boxes labeled vulnerable, shallow, mean, violent and depressed.

“Girls are doing spectacularly well,” said Males, who spoke to a packed house this month at a lecture sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Konopka Institute for Best Practices in Adolescent Health.

But Males is quick to acknowledge that there are still many challenges facing teen girls in the US.

He doesn’t dismiss the challenges, whether eating disorders, substance abuse, bullying or pornography. “But these problems exist throughout adult society, as well,” he said. “To generalize these problems to all girls is simply wrong.”

Columnist Gail Roseblum asks, “Why such a discrepancy between belief and reality?”

Males says it could be because of racial stereotyping, (these shifts are occurring amid unprecedented racial diversity in this country); or sexism (we seem more comfortable with the idea of girls being “innately vulnerable”), or simple data manipulation. A new book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures,” for example, correctly reports that suicide rates among girls ages 10 to 14 increased 76 percent between 2003 and 2004. In real numbers, though, the jump was from 56 to 98 deaths, among nearly 10 million girls of that age group. While not dismissing the profound grief experienced by those families, Males said that “a high-schooler is three times more likely to suffer a parent’s suicide than the other way around.”

The biggest sin in his mind? Omission. We know the ugliest demon our girls face, Males said. We just don’t want to talk about it.

“Violence in the home is the Number 1 cause of injury to females,” Males said. “This issue is too important to trivialize, but the media gloss right over it.”

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ScienceDaily.com ran a press release yesterday on new research in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness which looks at reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments. The study suggests that these parents “may avoid the need to choose whether to undergo pre-natal testing or to abort future pregnancies by simply avoiding subsequent pregnancy altogether.”

Parents are ‘choosing not to choose’, researcher Dr Susan Kelly, who is based at the Egenis research centre at the University of Exeter, suggests, in a ‘reflection of deep-seated ambivalence’ about the options and the limitations of new reproductive technologies.

According to ‘Choosing not to choose: reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments’ published in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness, more than two-thirds of parents in the USA-based study chose not to have any more children rather than accepting tests to identify or avoid the birth of an affected child. Of the parents who did have further children, a majority chose not to make use of prenatal screening or testing.

The researchers note:

“The choices associated with prenatal screening and genetic testing practices … were for most parents shaped by a heightened sense of the risks inherent in reproduction and of the limits of medicine’s ability to predict and control them,” says Dr Kelly.

“Faced with this set of choices, many parents chose to avoid future reproduction. Many parents did not perceive the information they understood to be available from prenatal testing to be useful or relevant to their sense of responsibility and control. Experiencing the birth of an affected child for some parents exposed the limitations of medical knowledge and practice, and placed medicine alongside other forms of interpretation and evidence. Interventions such as genetic testing for many were associated with uncertainty and a loss of control for parents as responsible caretakers and decision makers.”

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The Boston Globe reports on a series of new studies which draw upon mapping social networks and behavioral economics to help us better understand those new year’s resolutions to lose weight. These studies suggest that a spouse’s weight loss success can rub off on the other.

The study from the University of Connecticut says that couples not only tend to gain weight together, they can also lose it as a pair, even if only one of them is enrolled in a formal program. The spouses of the patients who attended regular meetings to encourage making dietary changes lost about five pounds over the course of a year, according to the results of the large clinical trial that examined weight loss strategies for people with type 2 diabetes.

“It was impressive, given they were not involved in the study program,” Amy A. Gorin, assistant professor of psychology at UConn and lead author of the article published in the International Journal of Obesity, said in an interview. “Intervening with one person in a family has a larger impact than we realized before.”

This new study draws upon the work of sociologist Nicholas Christakis…

Harvard sociologist and internist Dr. Nicholas Christakis made waves with a study last year linking obesity to social networks. Gorin, who cites his work in her paper, finds the power of peer influence encouraging when it’s flipped to the positive side.

Among the 357 couples she tracked, many of their food choices in the home became healthier – fewer potato chips and more fruits and vegetables, for example. Physical activity picked up, too.

“For some people, it was motivating to see someone start to exercise and eat healthier food,” she said, citing anecdotal evidence.

“I think my message would be, don’t underestimate the power of the environment on you,” she said. “If you start your New Year’s resolution with ‘I’m going to have enough willpower this time,’ I think you set yourself up for failure if you don’t have the support of the environment around you.”

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An article in the Boston Globe yesterday suggests that men may have a lot to learn from women when it comes to health. New research indicates that the ‘tough guy’ attitude is a key factor in gendered health disparities. 

“In American society, what does a real man do? A real man doesn’t show weakness,” said David R. Williams, a medical sociologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It leads a lot of men to not take preventive action for their health, to deny pain and seek medical attention only when the problem is much more severe.”

A richly detailed portrait of Bay Staters’ health, released earlier this month, proves the point – and provides stark evidence of a persistent divide between the genders. In category after category, women do a better job of taking care of their health. They smoke less and drink less, and they’re less likely to be overweight. They eat more fruits and vegetables. They have their cholesterol tested more regularly.

One especially telling finding: While men more frequently reported being diagnosed with high blood pressure, they were actually less likely than women to take drugs to tame it.

But what can men learn from women?

“Men can learn a lot from women,” said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “We know that some of our health awareness campaigns about the risk of smoking and the risk of binge drinking have to do a better job of being gender-specific.”

That could translate into initiatives centered in the workplace that, perhaps, promise lower insurance premiums for men – and women – who adopt healthy behaviors. And, at home, families could be encouraged to exercise together and share healthier meals.

There is hope that as traditional gender roles continue to shift – as more men, for example, assume family responsibilities historically associated with women – the gender divide will narrow.

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If you enjoyed the Crawler’s first look at the new study from Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-author James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, about the transmission of happiness, take a look at the latest installment courtesy of this weekend’s New York Times. 

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

Read on.

EurekAlert posted a press release this morning about a new study out of Brandeis University based on a content analysis of a prayer book housed in a Baltimore hospital. The study lends important insight into the details of individual prayers – an important subject of study given that 90% of Americans pray and more than half do so once a day or more. The release suggests that prayers can be large, such as good health, employment, and enduring relationships or small, including such assistance as finding parking spaces or missing objects.

The study found that prayer writers seek general strength, support, and blessing from their prayers, rather than explicit solutions to life’s difficult situations, and, more often than not, frame their prayers broadly enough to allow multiple outcomes to be interpreted as evidence of their prayers being answered.

Sociologist Wendy Cadge, the lead author, worked with others to conduct an analysis of 683 individuals prayers written between 1999 and 2005. The researchers found that “prayers fell into one of three categories: about 28 percent of the prayers were requests of God, while 28 percent were prayers to both thank and petition God, while another 22 percent of the prayers thanked God.”

“If researchers studying religion and health take seriously even the possibility that prayer may influence health, they need to learn more about what people pray for, how they pray, and what they hope will result from their prayers,” says Cadge. “The information in this study serves as general background and informs the mechanisms through which religion may influence health.”

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