Adieu cigarettes : Smoking is not contagious

Adieu cigarettes:
Smoking is not contagious
The sweetheart, mother, uncles and friends have the tobacco From sworn? Prima, then do you also
Young women and men

The rules Glimm constantly to abdicate, is apparently no individual decision, but is rather unconsciously in the herd instinct. The researchers have now of the Harvard Medical School in collaboration with the University of California at San Diego show. In its analysis of data from the Framingham Heart Study provided, the scientists have to Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler noted that abstinence attempts always within larger with each other directly or indirectly related groups emerge. Whether people to stop smoking, therefore, relies heavily whether family members, acquaintances or relatives also managed.

Synchronous smoke stop

"We have found that in large social networks of large groups of people who may not even know, all coincide with the smoking," says Christakis. The physicians and social scientists reconstructed with his fellow Californian social connections of around 12,000 people within the past 32 years.

Basis for the investigations was the Framhingham Heart Study, a long-term cardiovascular study, which is already in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts, was launched. Using data on changes in the family participants - such as birth, marriage, divorce and death - and information about friends, neighbours and work colleagues, the researchers succeeded the impact of abstinence experiments in the social groups to quantify.

Spouse play important role

The influence of spouses who have already successfully given up smoking, according to the scientists is the highest measure. Because if the A stop dropped the probability that the other weiterraucht to 67 percent. When friends and colleagues, the effect of 36 or 34 percent down.

If the friends to large numbers of active smokers, the chances are abstinent to be rather low, as friends of active smokers by 61 percent more likely to smoke themselves. Even friends of friends of a smoker go to the truck to 29 percent more often. Physical proximity plays in the social networks are no roles. For example, smoking or non-smoking neighbors have no influence on the decision to quit had. The example of friends and relatives effect but even if they live far away.


At the bottom of the social networks urged

Christakis and Fowler has also been a change in the composition of social groups observed. "If you back to the year 1971 looks are smokers and non-smokers alike in the centres of the networks to find," says Fowler. During the 1980s and 1990s were smokers but to the brink of social networks have been pushed. This exclusion by smoking may be considered by the researchers not only bad for the physical, but also for the social health. "In contrast to what we in the school may have thought, it seems that smoking is a very bad strategy in order to be popular," says Fowler.