Risk of developing MS may be linked to your personal network
Are healthy and unhealthy habits contagious? Can a person’s friends and families influence his or her risk of disease? A new study from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) reports an association between the habits of people connected to a participant and that person’s self-reported level of neurological disability. The findings help lay important groundwork by developing and making accessible scalable tools to allow clinical researchers to assess social networks in a quantifiable way. The results are published online today in Nature Communications. “We find that there’s a strong relationship between the health habits of people in a patient’s social network and outcomes that are of interest to physicians who specialize in multiple sclerosis [MS],” said lead author Amar Dhand, a neurologist in the Department of Neurology at BWH and assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “This relationship must not be ignored when considering an individual with neurological disabilities. We need to ask, ‘Is this...