Networking for health

doi:10.1136/bmj.a3153

Published 29 December 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a3153
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a3153

Editor's Choice

Networking for health

Fiona Godlee, editor, BMJ

fgodlee@bmj.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Contagion has been the curse of human health for centuries.Medicine has dedicated itself to preventing it. But what ifdiseases aren’t the only things that can be caught? Whatif good things can also be transmitted from one person to another—happinessfor example? This is the hypothesis explored in this week’sBMJ.

James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have been studying theeffects of social networks for some time. Now using a uniquedata set—the Framingham Heart Study cohort—they’veanalysed 20 years of data on nearly 5000 people, including measuresof happiness (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2338). Within this social networkthey found non-random clustering of happy and unhappy people.Could this be because happy people choose happy friends? Oris the effect due to confounding, as Ethan Cohen-Cole and JasonFletcher suggest (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2533)? Or is it, as Fowlerand Christakis conclude, a causative relation? I think theymake . . . [Full text of this article]

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