WSU study illustrates benefits of community

A study led by scientists at Washington State University found that social support for middle-aged Native Americans can mediate the association between depression, mortality and risk of cardiovascular disease.

The team also included members from the University of Colorado Denver, the University of New Mexico and investigators from the Strong Heart Study, an epidemiologic study of cardiovascular disease in Native Americans.

“Instrumental” social support, which refers to physical support such as giving a friend a ride to the doctor’s or helping buy groceries, was specifically found to decrease the risk of depression and mortality, said Astrid Suchy-Dicey, lead author of the study. Conversely, isolation and negative aspects of a social network could exacerbate the associations between depression and mortality.

Both depression and social support were found to be key factors in mortality and cardiovascular disease, she said.

“Social support lowered the risk of mortality. Depression increased the risk of mortality,” she said. “But I think personally, the really interesting finding was that social support can partially mediate that association between depression and mortality.”

Those factors influenced cardiovascular mortality, she said, but researchers also found that all forms of mortality were affected by social support.

Although similar findings have been published in research for other populations, Suchy-Dicey said, they had not been described in Native American populations.

“I think it’s important to study all people, because you never know when things are maybe a little different, because there’s a different environment, a different social context,” she said. “Just because something is intuitive, doesn’t really replace having data to support that intuition. So, you know, we wanted to do this study, to really fully understand whether — and to what degree — these different associations might exist.”

The analysis pulled from data on 2,786 middle-aged Native Americans collected by the Strong Heart Family Study, an expansion of the Strong Heart Study, which looked at cardiovascular disease risk in Native people in the Southwest, Northern and Southern Great Plains. Those participants included 12 different tribes, with participants who enrolled between 2001 and 2003 and were followed through 2017.

The next step, Suchy-Dicey said, is to do further research on what specifically about social support is responsible for the reduced risk of mortality and depression, and look into developing interventions to improve social support for middle-aged people in these communities.

Suchy-Dicey recently launched a new project that may help with that understanding, she said. That research, funded by the National Institute on Aging, will collect data from 3,000 people to look at factors that may have a positive impact on aging, including social support networks.

“(It will look at) social support, both having a broad network, but also having a deep network like people you can really rely on,” she said. “And then also looking at cultural and personal identity, and different aspects of cultural participation.”

The researcher’s analysis on Native populations so far may also be applicable to other groups living in rural areas or facing similar socioeconomic pressures, Suchy-Dicey said. When it comes to biological factors, many benefits of social support would likely apply across the board.

“There’s no reason to think that these biological associations would be any different. Race, of course, is a social construct.” she said. “I think that that’s a particular message that we all can take right now in this age where we’re all isolated working from home.”

Sun may be contacted at rsun@lmtribune.com or on Twitter at @Rachel_M_Sun. This report is made possible by the Lewis-Clark Valley Healthcare Foundation in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting, the Lewiston Tribune and the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.