Washington: Places with higher rates of economic connectedness — connections between people of lower and higher socioeconomic status, as indicated by Facebook friendships — had significantly lower rates of related premature deaths, according to a study presented in the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific with heart disease session together with the World Congress of Cardiology.
Previous studies have shown that being poor or having a low socioeconomic status increases a person’s risk of heart disease and premature death.
This new study is the first to assess health outcomes using Facebook friendships as a measure of economic connectedness.
The results suggest that connecting with people with above-average socioeconomic status, as measured by a multifaceted machine learning algorithm based on Facebook data at the individual and neighborhood levels, could help reduce the health impact of poverty and potentially helping to predict individual health risks or informing community-level health improvement efforts.
“Social networking is important to health,” said Tabitha Lobo, MD, an internist at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and the study’s lead author. “Mechanisms to improve social networks could be established through youth mentoring programs, internships, or school-based programs to connect people, and these could have long-term implications for neighborhood characteristics related to cardiovascular mortality.”
Researchers estimated neighborhood-level economic connectedness in the US by adapting a recently developed method to estimate the proportion of Facebook users in a given area who have a large number of Facebook friendships with people with a higher socioeconomic status than they themselves have. The method only tracked friendship status and did not track engagement via posts or messages. Neighborhoods with more connected individuals were assigned high economic connectedness, while neighborhoods where people had fewer connections to individuals with higher socioeconomic status were assigned low economic connectedness.
The researchers compared neighborhood-level economic connectedness data to county-level rates of premature death from heart disease. To assess the rate of premature deaths, they analyzed records of over 900,000 deaths among people between the ages of 25 and 65 that occurred between 2018 and 2020, and listed heart disease as the underlying cause of death.
The results showed that places with greater economic connectivity tended to have lower rates of premature cardiovascular death, a pattern that was true both nationally and regionally. After accounting for race, gender, social vulnerability scores (a metric that captures a community’s ability to prevent human suffering and financial loss in the event of a disaster), and county-level risk factors, economic connectedness derived from social media explains an estimated 57% of inter -County variability in premature cardiovascular death rates.
Although more research is needed to understand the factors at play, the researchers said this social media-based metric of economic connectedness can help quantify an individual’s opportunity for economic growth. Relationships with people of higher socioeconomic status, whether in person or online, could increase a person’s awareness of and access to educational opportunities, employment opportunities, heart-healthy lifestyle choices, and other benefits, impacting not only economic prospects, but for long View. long-term health outcomes. The results suggest that economic connectedness derived from social media could be a useful metric to predict heart disease risk and design interventions to improve health, the researchers said.
“If we can predict a person’s risk, we can use that information to guide medical treatments,” Lobo said. “Traditionally we have focused on individual interventions, but this gives us the opportunity to work more at the community level, for example by providing policymakers with information on how to improve the overall health of a community, rather than just focusing on an individual.”
A limitation of the study is that the economic connectedness metric only includes people who have Facebook accounts, and the degree to which the economically connectedness of Facebook users compares to the connectedness of the general population is unknown.
Recent reports estimate that approximately 70% of US adults use Facebook, with younger and middle age groups using the platform the most and teens and older adults using it less.
The researchers also said that the Facebook-based metric for economic connectedness is still new and has not yet been extensively validated or compared to other metrics used to understand economic growth potential.
