The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (45 page)

33.
P. E. Routassalo et al., “Social Contacts and Their Relationship to Loneliness among Aged People: A Population Based Study,”
Gerontology
52 (2006); R. S. Tilvis et al., “Suffering from Loneliness Indicates Significant Mortality Risk of Older People,”
Journal of Aging Research
(2011).

34.
Iwasaki et al., “Social Networks and Mortality.”

35.
When I refer to face-to-face interaction in this book, I don’t necessarily mean nose-to-nose and eyeball-to-eyeball, but in the same room or at the same table, interacting with one another.

36.
T. W. Valente et al., “Variations in Network Boundary and Type: A Study of Adolescent Peer Influences,”
Social Networks
35, no. 3 (2013).

CHAPTER 1: SWIMMING THROUGH THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

1.
  The exceptions include cancers related to smoking or working with asbestos.

2.
  Elaine Louie, “After the Years’ Ups and Downs, Beginning Again,”
New York Times
, December 4, 2011.

3.
  Reading a draft of this chapter, Dr. Steve Cole, of the UCLA Medical Center, made the following observation: “It is true that social contact bolsters immunity. But the health benefits go far beyond the immune system to include growth of blood vessels, the activation of genes in cells throughout the body, changes in brain function, etc.” (personal communication, December 13, 2012).

4.
  
J. S. House, K. R. Landis, and D. Umberson, “Social Relationships and Health,”
Science
241, no. 4865 (1988).

5.
  In his review of Mukherjee’s book, the late Canadian oncologist Robert Buckman wrote: “Just as a car can fail in hundreds of different ways, each of which may need a different type of remedy, so the cancers can be triggered by hundreds of different causative factors, creating (or being created by) many different flaws, and combinations of flaws, in cellular pathways and mechanisms.”

6.
  Though reported rates of breast cancer tend to be highest in Western democracies, developing economies are beginning to catch up. One reason for the disparity in diagnosis rates is that women in countries with spotty or expensive health-care coverage often discover breast tumors only at an advanced stage of growth. As timely access to diagnostic resources such as ultrasounds, mammograms, and biopsies is not available to many women, their breast cancers are not counted in the statistics and seem invisible. Thus the national incidence of the disease may be underreported in these countries.

7.
  Sandra Levy et al., “Perceived Social Support and Tumor Estrogen/Progesterone Receptor Status as Predictors of Natural Killer Cell Activity in Breast Cancer Patients,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
52 (1990); David Spiegel et al., “Effects of Psychosocial Treatment in Prolonging Cancer Survival May Be Mediated by Neuroimmune Pathways,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
840 (1998); K. R. Ell et al., “Social Relations, Social Support and Survival among Patients with Cancer,”
Journal of Psychosomatic Research
36, no. 6 (1992).

8.
  Peggy Reynolds and George Kaplan, “Social Connections and Risk for Cancer: Prospective Evidence from the Alameda County Study,”
Behavioral Medicine
16, no. 3 (1990).

9.
  In physician and
New Yorker
writer Atul Gawande’s remarkable account of solitary confinement, he cites a US military study of nearly 150 naval aviators who returned from imprisonment and torture in Vietnam; they reported that they had found social isolation far more agonizing and damaging than any of the physical abuse they were subjected to.
Gawande’s article reports that prisoners put in “the hole” (solitary confinement) in American prisons, often become psychotic, catatonic, or suicidal when deprived of all social contact. Atul Gawande, “Hellhole: The United States Holds Tens of Thousands of Inmates in Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Is This Torture?”
New Yorker
, March 30, 2009.

10.
Richard A. Gibbs, George M. Weinstock, and et al., “Genome Sequence of the Brown Norway Rat Yields Insights into Mammalian Evolution,”
Nature
428 (2004).

11.
G. L. Hermes et al., “Social Isolation Dysregulates Endocrine and Behavioral Stress While Increasing Malignant Burden of Spontaneous Mammary Tumors,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
106, no. 52 (2009). Martha K. McClintock, Suzanne D. Conzen, Sarah Gehlert, et al., “Mammary Cancer and Social Interactions: Identifying Multiple Environments That Regulate Gene Expression Throughout the Life Span,”
Journals of Gerontology
Series B, 60B (2005).

12.
J. Bradley Williams et al., “A Model of Gene-Environment Interaction Reveals Altered Mammary Gland Gene Expression and Increased Tumor Growth Following Social Isolation,”
Cancer Prevention Research
2 (2009).

13.
K. M. Stavraky et al., “The Effect of Psychosocial Factors on Lung Cancer Mortality at One Year,”
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
41, no. 1 (1988); Sheldon Cohen, “Social Relationships and Susceptibility to the Common Cold,” in
Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health
, ed. Carol D. Ryff and M. Burton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

14.
Kroenke et al., “Social Networks, Social Support.” Some other studies have tested and not found a strong connection between social support and an improved survival rate after breast cancer, but most of these assessed social support in the form of a clinical intervention—people visited or provided help after the diagnosis as part of a breast cancer treatment plan—and subsequently the experimenters tested whether this (artificial social) contact had a therapeutic effect. Studies such as Kroenke et
al. are more interesting because they mimic real life by testing whether naturally occurring relationships and social networks are protective.

15.
Chul-joo Lee, Stacy Wang Gray, and Nehama Lewis, “Internet Use Leads Cancer Patients to Be Active Health Care Consumers,”
Patient Education and Counseling
81, no. 1 (2010).

16.
Gunther Eysenbach et al., “Health Related Virtual Communities and Electronic Support Groups: A Systematic Review of the Effects of Online Peer to Peer Interactions,”
British Medical Journal
328, no. 7449 (2004).

17.
Cole et al., “Social Regulation of Gene Expression”; S. W. Cole and et al., “Transcript Origin Analysis Identifies Antigen Presenting Cells as Primary Targets of Socially Regulated Gene Expression in Leukocytes,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
108 (2011).

18.
Cacioppo and Patrick,
Loneliness
; M. A. Distel et al., “Familial Resemblance for Loneliness,”
Behavior Genetics
40, no. 4 (2010); John T. Cacioppo et al., “In the Eye of the Beholder: Individual Differences in Perceived Social Isolation Predict Regional Brain Activation to Social Stimuli,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
21, no. 1 (2008).

19.
D. E. Stewart et al., “Attributions of Cause and Recurrence in Long-Term Breast Cancer Survivors,”
Psycho-Oncology
10, no. 2 (2001).

20.
K. A. Phillips et al., “Psychosocial Factors and Survival of Young Women with Breast Cancer: A Population-Based Prospective Cohort Study,”
Journal of Clinical Oncology
26, no. 28 (2008).

21.
David Kissane, “Beyond the Psychotherapy and Survival Debate: The Challenge of Social Disparity, Depression and Treatment Adherence in Psychosocial Cancer Care,”
Psycho-Oncology
18, no. 1–5 (2009); D. Kissane et al., “Effect of Cognitive-Existential Group Therapy on Survival in Early-Stage Breast Cancer,”
Journal of Clinical Oncology
22, no. 21 (2004); D. Kissane, “Letting Go of the Hope that Psychotherapy Prolongs Cancer Survival,”
Journal of Clinical Oncology
25, no. 36 (2007).

22.
The only exception to this rule, as Memorial Sloan-Kettering psychiatrist David Kissane points out, is that cancer patients with major depression
are less likely to follow their treatment plans. If you treat their depression they may live longer, because of better compliance with medical advice. See Kissane, “Beyond the Psychotherapy and Survival Debate.”

23.
Jan Hoffman, “Elizabeth Edwards, Through Many Eyes,”
New York Times
, December 12, 2010.

24.
Gail Sheehy, “Remembering Elizabeth Edwards,”
wowOwow: The Women on the Web
, January 9, 2011,
www.womensmedianation.com/items/view/54708
; Associated Press, “Elizabeth Edwards’ Cancer at a Critical Stage.”

25.
Stewart et al., “Attributions of Cause and Recurrence.”

26.
It is interesting that Sylvie attributed the arrival of breast cancer in three consecutive generations of family members to unmanaged stress instead of to the possibility that those women, including herself, were possibly carrying BRCA1, BRCA2, or a series of other genes responsible for about 5% to 10% of all breast cancers, according to the National Institute of Health’s website,
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/breast-cancer
.

27.
Robert M. Sapolsky,
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
, 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 171.

28.
Bert Garssen, “Psychological Factors and Cancer Development: Evidence after 30 Years of Research,”
Clinical Psychological Review
24 (2004); S. O. Dalton et al., “Mind and Cancer: Do Psychological Factors Cause Cancer?”
European Journal of Cancer
38 (2002); Felicia D. Roberts et al., “Self-Reported Stress and Risk of Breast Cancer,”
Cancer
77, no. 6 (1996).

29.
A relationship may exist between two events. And that relationship, even if it’s coincidental, contributes to a feeling of control. Refraining from doing something may protect you from a known harm. But removing that one risk doesn’t mean that disaster won’t happen. For example, we know that drunk drivers can cause horrifying road accidents, but people who have never swallowed a drop of alcohol before getting behind the wheel may still be in a car crash. Similarly, even if we know that face-to-face social support—especially from women—can help
prevent the recurrence of breast cancer, the reverse isn’t necessarily true. We can’t say that the disease returned because the right support wasn’t there. Nor can we say that Elizabeth Edwards’s unfair share of life’s worst trials, including her husband’s humiliating affair, caused her cancer to metastasize.

30.
M. Ewertz, “Bereavement and Breast Cancer,”
British Journal of Cancer
53 (1986).

31.
In his book on stress and stress-related diseases,
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
, Robert Sapolsky explains it this way: “Very high levels of glucocorticoids will suppress levels of estrogens in females and testosterone in males, and certain types of cancers are stimulated by these hormones (most notably “estrogen-sensitive” forms of breast cancer and “androgen-sensitive” prostate cancers). In these cases, lots of stress equals lots of glucocorticoids equals less estrogen or testosterone equals slower tumor growth” (162).

32.
Naja Rod Nielsen et al., “Self-Reported Stress and Risk of Breast Cancer: Prospective Cohort Study,”
British Medical Journal
331, no. 7516 (2005).

33.
C. Johansen and J. H. Olsen, “Psychological Stress, Cancer Incidence and Mortality from Non-malignant Diseases,”
British Journal of Cancer
75, no. 1 (1997). In this Danish study more than eleven thousand parents of children who had died of cancer were followed longitudinally. Though they suffered one of the worst trials facing any parent, they were not more likely than other parents to be diagnosed with cancer themselves.

34.
Ewertz, “Bereavement and Breast Cancer”; P. Reynolds and G. A. Kaplan, “Social Connections and Risk for Cancer: Prospective Evidence from the Alameda County Study,”
Journal of Behavioral Medicine
16, no. 3 (1990).

35.
Reynolds and Kaplan, “Social Connections and Risk for Cancer.” The authors of this excellent study note that the cancers most commonly found in women are hormone related and that one of the major risk factors for early death is feeling socially isolated. Interestingly, social support both prompts and is prompted by hormonal activity.

36.
Carol D. Ryff et al., “Elective Affinities and Uninvited Agonies”; D. Spiegel and Rachel Kimerling, “Group Psychotherapy”; and Harry T. Reis, “Relationship Experiences and Emotional Well-being,” all in
Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health
, ed. Carol D. Ryff and Burton H. Singer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Harry T. Reis, “The Interpersonal Context of Emotions: Gender Differences in Intimacy and Related Behaviors,” in
Sex Differences and Similarities in Communication
, ed. D. J. Canary and K. Dindia (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998).

37.
T. Seeman et al., “Social Ties and Support and Neuroendocrine Function: MacArthur Studies of Successful Aging,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
16 (1994); Carol D. Ryff and Burton H. Singer, “Integrating Emotion into the Study of Social Relationships and Health,” in
Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health
, ed. Carol D. Ryff and Burton H. Singer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

38.
Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Lindred L. Greer, and et al., “The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict among Humans,”
Science
328, no. 5984 (2010); Angela J. Grippo et al., “Oxytocin Protects against Negative Behavioral and Autonomic Consequences of Long-Term Social Isolation,”
Psychoendocrinology
34 (2009).

39.
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,”
American Journal of Sociology
78 (1973).