A study presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together With the World Congress of Cardiology found that areas with higher rates of economic connectedness—linkages between people of lower and higher socioeconomic status as indicated by Facebook friendships—had significantly lower rates of premature death due to heart disease.
Past research has demonstrated that a person’s risk of heart disease and early death is increased by poverty or poor socioeconomic position. This new study is the first to use Facebook buddies as a criterion for economic connectedness to evaluate health consequences. According to its findings, having social connections with people who have higher socioeconomic status than the average, as determined by a complex machine learning algorithm based on Facebook user and area level data, may assist to mitigate the effects of poverty.
Researchers adapted a method recently developed to estimate the percentage of Facebook users in a particular area who have a large number of Facebook friendships with people of a higher socioeconomic status than themselves in order to estimate economic connectedness at the neighborhood level across the U.S. Only the status of friendship was tracked; posts or messages were not included in the measurement. High economic connectedness was defined as having more highly linked residents, while low economic connectedness was defined as having less links to residents with higher socioeconomic status.
Researchers compared county-level heart disease mortality rates with data on economic connectivity at the neighborhood level. They examined data from over a billion records to determine premature death rates.
While more research is needed to understand the factors at play, researchers said that this social media-based metric of economic connectedness may help to quantify a person’s opportunity for economic growth. Relationships with people of a higher socioeconomic status, whether in person or online, could improve a person’s awareness of and access to educational opportunities, job opportunities, heart-healthy lifestyle habits and other benefits, with implications not only for economic prospects but also long-term health outcomes. The findings suggest that economic connectedness derived from social media could be a useful metric for predicting heart disease risk and designing interventions to improve health, researchers said.
