Giving social support to others may boost your health
Ohio State University
While
researchers have long thought that receiving social support from others is a
key to health, results from studies have shown mixed results. So researchers
from The Ohio State University decided to see if giving support may also play
an important role in health.
They found that
on one important measure of health -- chronic inflammation -- indicators of
positive social relationships were associated with lower inflammation only
among people who said they were available to provide social support to family
and friends.
In other words,
having friends to lean on may not help your health unless you also say that
you're available to help them when they need it.
"Positive relationships may be associated with lower inflammation only for those who believe they can give more support in those relationships," said Tao Jiang, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State.
Preliminary
evidence in the study suggested that the link between health and the
willingness to help others may be especially important for women.
Jiang conducted
the research with Jennifer Crocker, professor; Baldwin Way, associate
professor; and Syamil Yakin, research assistant, all in psychology at Ohio
State. Their study was published online this month in the journal Brain, Behavior
and Immunity.
The results show
that the healing power of good relationships comes from the fact that the
support is mutual, Way said.
"It may be
that when people believe they can give more support to friends and family,
these relationships are especially rewarding and stress-relieving, which
reduces inflammation," he said.
The study used
data from 1,054 participants in the National Survey of Midlife Development in
the U.S. These were all healthy adults between 34 and 84 years old.
Participants
completed a questionnaire that measured their "social integration,"
asking if they were married or living with a partner, how often they contacted
family and friends, and how often they attended social groups or activities.
Participants
also completed a measure of how much they believed they could rely on their
family, friends or spouse if they needed help.
The key to this
research is the fact that the dataset is one of the few that also asked
participants to rate how much they were available to support family, friends
and spouse, Jiang said.
About two years
later, these participants returned for blood tests, which included a test for
interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is a marker of systemic inflammation in the body.
"Higher
levels of IL-6 are associated with increased risk for many of the diseases that
are the top killers of Americans, including cardiovascular disease and
cancer," Way said.
"That's why
we thought it was important to find out why previous studies found such weak
evidence for the link between social support and lower inflammation."
The findings
showing the importance of being available to help others held true even after
taking into account a broad range of other factors that may affect
inflammation, from age, income and education to health behaviors, medication
use and diagnosed medical conditions.
An exploratory
analysis suggested that the connection between offering social support and
health may be mostly found in women, Jiang said.
"This
reflects the idea that social relationships are often seen as more important
for women than for men," Jiang said. "But our sample size was not
large enough to show that conclusively. We need to study that issue
further."
Way said it is
important to note that this study only looked at what people said they were
willing to do, and not their actions.
But the study
does give "a more nuanced understanding" of the link between health
and relationships, Jiang said.
"This work
underscores the importance of incorporating the concept of giving support into
future research in this area," he said.
