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For older adults, having more or closer family members in one's social network decreases his or her likelihood of death, but having a larger or closer group of friends does not, finds a new study that will be presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
"We found that older individuals who had more family in their network, as well as older people who were closer with their family were less likely to die," said James Iveniuk, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. "No such associations were observed for number of or closeness to friends."
[...] In the first wave, these older adults were asked to list up to five of their closest confidants, describe in detail the nature of each relationship, and indicate how close they felt to each person. Excluding spouses, the average number of close confidants named was 2.91, and most older adults perceived high levels of support from their social contacts. Additionally, most respondents were married, in good physical health, and reported not being very lonely.
Iveniuk and co-author L. Philip Schumm, a senior biostatistician at the University of Chicago, found that older adults who reported feeling "extremely close" on average to the non-spousal family members they listed as among their closest confidants had about a six percent risk of mortality within the next five years, compared to approximately a 14 percent risk of mortality among those who reported feeling "not very close" to the family members they listed.
Furthermore, the study found that respondents who listed more non-spousal family members in their network—irrespective of closeness—had lower odds of death compared to those who listed fewer family members. "Regardless of the emotional content of a connection, simply having a social relationship with another person may have benefits for longevity," Iveniuk said.
Iveniuk said he was surprised that feeling closer to one's family members and having more relatives as confidants decreased the risk of death for older adults, but that the same was not true of relationships with friends.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @07:38PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age#Risk_of_birth_defects [wikipedia.org]
[Quoted because likelihood of following a link is zero:]
Risk of birth defects
A woman's risk of having a baby with chromosomal abnormalities increases with her age. Down syndrome is the most common chromosomal birth defect, and a woman's risk of having a baby with Down syndrome is:
At age 20, 1 in 1,441
At age 25, 1 in 1,383
At age 30, 1 in 959
At age 35, 1 in 338
At age 40, 1 in 84
At age 45, 1 in 32
At age 50, 1 in 44
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @08:13PM
Hmm, that's not a monotonically increasing function.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @08:57PM
I looked that up...
"The prevalence does not continue increasing at an increasing rate with age above age 45 as has been previously assumed. Above this age the rate of increase declines with increasing age. The overall age pattern is sigmoidal. A new logit logistic model is proposed which fits the data well. The risk of a Down's syndrome live birth is given by: risk=1/(1+exp(7.330-4.211/(1+exp(-0.282x(age-37.23)))))."
Interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @11:31PM
Oh, that's from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11943789 [nih.gov], one of the citations on that Wikipedia page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @11:11AM
Notice the CUNTnation doesn't list for lower than 20.