Hirdes 1992 - "The importance of social relationships, socioeconomic status and health practices with respect to mortality among healthy Ontario males"

Hirdes, Forbes
"The importance of social relationships, socioeconomic status and health practices with respect to mortality among healthy Ontario males"
Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
February 1992; v45, n2; pp 175-182
On the Web
Relevance: Medium

The authors examined 2000 men in Ontario and found that social relationships had "a strong association with mortality." Unfortunately, their social relationships index was comprised of marital status, number of children, family contact, and participation in voluntary associations -- only the last of these is conceivably affected by sprawl. Also, the strong association of social capital to mortality is in the comparison between the highest scoring 10% in social capital and the lowest scoring 10%. It's not clear whether sprawl is affect social capital in these extremes or in the middle 80% (where, in turn, the effects on mortality are less pronounced).

Interestingly, the effect of income was greater than the effect of social capital (adjusted relative risk of 0.41 versus 0.30). The effect of income is even greater because the risk factors for income include the top 20% versus the bottom 20% (not just top and bottom deciles, as for social capital).