Social Relationships and Mortality Risk Meta-Analysis Across 148 Studies

A meta-analytic review aggregating data from 148 studies with 308,849 participants to examine the link between social relationships and mortality risk. The dataset includes extracted information on participant characteristics like cause of mortality and initial health status, as well as study characteristics like follow-up length. It was authored by Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University.

Use Cases

• Quantifying the effect size of social relationships on mortality based on the reported odds ratios.
• Comparing the predictive strength of different social measurement types, such as complex integration versus binary residential status.
• Investigating potential moderators of mortality risk across age, sex, and health status as suggested by the analysis.
• Validating social integration as a risk factor comparable to other established mortality risks.

Strengths

• Large aggregated sample size of 308,849 participants from 148 independent studies.
• Analysis reports a specific, consistent effect size (OR = 1.50) across multiple demographic and health subgroups.
• Compares different types of social relationship measurements, providing granularity on their predictive power.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• The underlying raw participant-level data from the 148 studies is not directly accessible; the dataset contains aggregated, extracted meta-analysis data.

Provenance

Source

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Brigham Young University

Collection Method

Meta-analytic review and data extraction from 148 published studies.