Tell me what social friends you have and I’ll tell you if your heart is at risk. In the future, perhaps, the monitoring of Facebook “friends” for each subject could become a valid support for defining who is most likely to suffer heart attacks, strokes or in any case premature death from cardiovascular causes. A curious research that emerges from the American College of Cardiology congress suggests that the ways of interacting with social media can become an index of heart well-being. The study was coordinated by Tabitha Lobo, of the Clelevand University Hospital, and focuses attention on the importance of networks, even virtual ones, in defining an individual’s path to well-being. The conclusion of the research is simple: the more a person manages to have friendships that in some way raise his social level, according to the research, the better the possible outcomes will be in terms of cardiovascular health and maintenance of well-being.
Heart door
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in collaboration with the IRCSS & NExT-H Cardiological Network
The value of the virtual community
The study, for the first time, analyzes friendships on social media to assess cardiovascular health. And he comes to hypothesize that being in contact with people with a socio-economic status above the average of the area where you live could be important for improving cardiovascular outcomes and risks, thanks to assessments made by a specific multifaceted machine learning algorithm that associates information of Facebook with data on the subject and the area in which he lives. The American experts only monitored the status of virtual friendships, without analyzing the possible content of the messages of the subjects studied. Then they compared the economic and social data of the neighborhoods studied with the rates of premature death related to heart disease in the area, analyzing information on nearly one million deaths in people aged between 25 and 65 years old occurred between 2018 and 2020, with heart disease as the cause of death.
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Connections that promote well-being
As might be expected, the risk of premature death from cardiovascular disease was lower in areas where economic well-being was higher. But be careful: considering the possible variables, such as gender and possible social vulnerability as well as risks associated with the environment in which one lives, social media and friendships appear really important in defining risks. and to quantify a person’s opportunities for economic and social growth (and therefore health). In particular, it has been seen that relationships with people of a higher socioeconomic status, both in person and online, could help make individuals more aware of their cardiovascular well-being and healthy lifestyle habits, with a positive impact on future well-being. even in the long run. And social media could become educational tools within everyone’s reach. According to the Lobo “mechanisms to improve social networks could be established through youth mentorship programs, internships or school programs to connect people, and these could have long-term effects on neighborhood characteristics with respect to cardiovascular mortality”. The strategy, therefore, is to work on the community as well as on the individual.
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Not just Facebook
Even tweets on Twitter, however, could be useful in helping to understand who runs the greatest risk for the heart. To say that based on the content of the messages it could be identified who has a profile to follow carefully is a research conducted some time ago by the team of Johannes Eichstaedt of the University of Pennsylvania, which appeared in Psychological Science. A careful analysis of what is tweeted day after day could reveal well-being and bad habits at tables and in lifestyles (for example alcohol consumption and sedentary lifestyle), with a better definition of the risk for the arteries and heart. Scholars have evaluated the linguistic timbre of many chirps, correlating them with information deriving from the Centers for Disease Control relating to the same geographical areas considered, area by area, examining both the mortality rates for heart disease and the incidence of different risk factors, just like smoking. high blood pressure or sedentary lifestyle. Result: the more the words used had a positive tenor, from “wonderful” to “friends”, the lower the risk of death from a heart attack appeared. Conversely, if the words used had dark outlines and were colored with insults and contempt, the danger to the heart was greater.
Heart door
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