Networking for health

doi:10.1136/bmj.a3153

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Fiona Godlee, editor, BMJ

fgodlee{at}bmj.com

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

James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have been studying the effects of social networks for some time. Now using a unique data set—the Framingham Heart Study cohort—they’ve analysed 20 years of data on nearly 5000 people, including measures of happiness (doi:10.1136/bmj.a2338). Within this social network they found non-random clustering …