Social Contact Not As Correlated to Life Expectancy as Thought
In this analysis of many independent studies, the authors suggest that more social contact, on its own and independent of all of the other items associated with it, is not as meaningfully associated with greater life expectancy as was thought. It isn't hard to speculate on the outcomes that are associated with more gregarious individuals, such as greater wealth, and on how these outcomes impact lifestyle choices and use of medical resources. There is a strong web of correlations between wealth, intelligence, education, and life expectancy. It is interesting, but like all examinations of natural variations in human longevity at the present time, it is a distraction from efforts that aim to make everyone live far longer in good health. Given the means to repair the causes of aging and prevent age-related disease, all of the small things that presently shift life expectancy a little in one direction or the other will no longer matter in the slightest.
Social contact frequency is a well-defined and relatively objective measure of social relationships, which according to many studies is closely associated with health and longevity. However, no previous meta-analysis has isolated this measure; existing reviews instead aggregate social contact with other diverse measures of social support, leaving unexplored the unique contribution of social contact to mortality. Furthermore, no study has sufficiently explored the factors that may moderate the relationship between contact frequency and mortality.We conducted meta-analyses and meta-regressions to examine 187 all-cause mortality risk estimates from 91 publications, providing data on about 400,000 persons. The mean hazard ratio (HR) for mortality among those with lower levels of social contact frequency was 1.13 among multivariate-adjusted HRs. However, sub-group meta-analyses show that there is no significant relationship between contact and mortality for male individuals and that contact with family members does not have a significant effect. The moderate effect sizes and the lack of association for some subgroups suggest that mere social contact frequency may not be as beneficial to one's health as previously thought.
I always thought the social contact influences life span arguments were essentially smoke-screens for promoting social engineering schemes (both left wing and right wing). Its nice to see it discredited once and for all.