Friends More Likely to Influence Obesity than Genes?
You all know I am fascinated by Network Theory, and its leadership implications.
Well, Albert-László Barabási (a guru of much of today's Network Science) wrote a fascinating Editorial for the New England Journal of Medecine (July 26th, 2007)
In effect researchers have shown that individuals who get obese influence the chances of their friends getting obese more than their friend's genes seem to do.
Is that some kind of perverse Leadership in action, peer pressure, or just following by example?
Here's how Prof. Barabási started the editorial ....
"A recent study reported that among people who carried a single copy of the high-risk allele for the FTO gene, which is associated with fat mass and obesity, the risk of obesity increased by 30%. ...
That obesity has a genetic component is not surprising: researchers have long known that it often runs in families. In this issue of the Journal, Christakis and Fowler suggest that friends have an even more important effect on a person's risk of obesity than genes do. The authors reconstructed a social network showing the ties between friends, neighbors, spouses, and family members among participants of the Framingham Heart Study, making use of the fact that the participants had been asked to name their friends to facilitate follow-up in the study.
The authors observed that when two persons perceived each other as friends, if one friend became obese during a given time interval, the other friend's chances of following suit increased by 171%. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%.
The results of this study also indicate that obesity is clustered in communities. For example, the risk that the friend of a friend of an obese person would be obese was about 20% higher in the observed network than in a random network; this effect vanished only by the fourth degree of separation."
Read the rest of the Editorial .... and consider the implications for obesity ...
And, for those of you equally interested by network science, consider the medical implications of doing simlilar analysis on other issues.
Well, Albert-László Barabási (a guru of much of today's Network Science) wrote a fascinating Editorial for the New England Journal of Medecine (July 26th, 2007)
In effect researchers have shown that individuals who get obese influence the chances of their friends getting obese more than their friend's genes seem to do.
Is that some kind of perverse Leadership in action, peer pressure, or just following by example?
Here's how Prof. Barabási started the editorial ....
"A recent study reported that among people who carried a single copy of the high-risk allele for the FTO gene, which is associated with fat mass and obesity, the risk of obesity increased by 30%. ...
That obesity has a genetic component is not surprising: researchers have long known that it often runs in families. In this issue of the Journal, Christakis and Fowler suggest that friends have an even more important effect on a person's risk of obesity than genes do. The authors reconstructed a social network showing the ties between friends, neighbors, spouses, and family members among participants of the Framingham Heart Study, making use of the fact that the participants had been asked to name their friends to facilitate follow-up in the study.
The authors observed that when two persons perceived each other as friends, if one friend became obese during a given time interval, the other friend's chances of following suit increased by 171%. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%.
The results of this study also indicate that obesity is clustered in communities. For example, the risk that the friend of a friend of an obese person would be obese was about 20% higher in the observed network than in a random network; this effect vanished only by the fourth degree of separation."
Read the rest of the Editorial .... and consider the implications for obesity ...
And, for those of you equally interested by network science, consider the medical implications of doing simlilar analysis on other issues.
Labels: Barabási, network analysis, obesity
posted by mick yates @ 9:54 PM permalink
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