Word: christakises
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to co-author and Harvard Professor of Medical Sociology Nicholas A. Christakis, the data suggest a need to revise upwards efficacy estimates of public health interventions to account for reverberating effects through social networks.
“Most evaluations of public policies that involve cost effectiveness compute the cost at an individual level and then calculate the benefits,” Christakis said. “If our findings are correct, a 20-pound weight loss in you might also induce weight loss...in...
The co-author of the study, Dr. Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard Medical School, claims the obesity contagion is not merely a matter of like-minded people befriending one another. "It's not that obese or nonobese people simply find other similar people to hang out with."
Fowler and Christakis say that the contagion effect should hold just as much for weight loss as it does for weight gain. "I would hope this influences individuals to get friends and families involved in decisions about health," Fowler says. After all, he says, a weight-loss plan may be...
For policy analysts, then, the lesson is that public-health interventions may well be far more cost-effective than previously acknowledged. Helping one person lose weight can have a snowball effect through an entire social network, affecting social norms among the target person's friends and acquaintances. "There's been...