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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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How Is Social Relationship Linked To Heart Disease? A healthy lifestyle is definitely paramount in preventing heart disease and other chronic diseases. It includes having a balanced diet, daily exercise, and adequate sleep, keeping healthy weight, managing stress in positive ways, and not smoking or drinking alcohol. A balanced diet means consuming the all the different food groups in the right quantities. The 5 main food groups are: whole grains, fruit and vegetables, protein, diary, and fat & sugar. People often, however, ignore or unaware of another important factor that is linked to development of heart disease: the quality of one’s relationship! Relationship is a connection between people, like marriage, kinship and friendship. Good health and happiness at the age of 80 were not determined by money, success, or a healthy cholesterol level at age of 50. Instead, it was how satisfied the men were with their relationships. This was the results revealed by the Harvard study of adult development that stared in the 1930s and is still going on today. The study followed 724 men with diverse backgrounds: 268 Harvard College students and 456 inner-city Boston school boys who are poor and underprivileged. In a paper published in the February 2000’s issue of the Journal ‘Preventive Medicine’, researchers reported that social relationships have a beneficial effect on several behaviors that directly or indirectly affect the risk of cardiovascular disease, using data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III conducted from 1988 to 1994.
The power of relationships and community on health and longevity could also be seen in the well-known Roseto effect, which is the phenomenon by which a close-knit community experiences a reduced rate of heart disease. Roseto is a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. The Roseto effect was first noticed in 1961 by a local doctor who realized there was an exceptionally low rate of heart disease in the town, compared with some of the surrounding towns. From 1954 to 1961, Roseto had nearly no heart attacks for men age between 55 and 64, and men over 65 enjoyed a death rate of 1 percent while the national average was 2 percent. Such statistics seemed contradicting as the residents in Roseto smoked cigars, drank lots of wine, and ate meatballs, sausage, plenty of cheese, and exposed to potentially toxic gases and dust in the slate quarries. Nevertheless, the community was very close-knit with no crime and people there supported each other. When suburbanization began in the 1970s around the region that included the town, single family homes, fenced yards, country clubs were brought in. The social ties started to weaken and fail, and the rates of heart disease and premature death rose, equaling the rates of the surrounding towns. In 1971, the first person under the age of 45 died of a heart attack. Occasionally, relationships can be filled with sadness, anger, confusion and stress. A stressful relationship or marriage can cause one to become heartbroken. According to a 2000 study published in the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’, women who reported moderate to severe marital strain were 2.9 times more likely to require heart surgery, suffer heart attacks or die of heart disease than women without marital stress. These findings were supported by another study published in the ‘American Journal of Cardiology’ in 2006. It found that patients with the most severe heart disease and poorest marriages had the highest risk of dying over a 4-year period. The 4-year survival rate of those with severe heart disease and poor marriages was 42 percent, compared with 78 percent among patients with milder heart disease and good marriages. Clearly, good relationships can promote health, yet negative relationships can place the heart at risk. Hence, besides eating well, moving daily and getting sufficient sleep, it is also paramount for one to nurture relationships that can raise the energy and enjoyment from life, and more importantly, to keep one in a healthy shape.
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