Social support reduces resting cardiovascular function in women

Abstract

Social support is believed to benefit cardiovascular health in part by buffering recipients from life stress. Classically, this has been investigated by exploring the relationship between support and cardiovascular reactivity to laboratory stress. Such research customarily emphasizes stress responses and downplays the relevance of resting cardiovascular levels. However, it is now appreciated that resting cardiovascular function is associated with disease risk independently of reactivity. Moreover, such mechanisms are known to be relevant to female members of the population, despite the fact that much previous research has focused on males. Reactivity research rests on the assumption that stress promotes gradual hypertension over time. As such, it is important to establish the relationship between psychosocial factors and resting blood pressure. In a cross-sectional biopsychosocial screening study, we examined resting cardiovascular levels in 211 healthy non-smoking women, using regression to assess associations with psychometric indices of social support (namely, perceived network size and perceived satisfaction with support) while controlling for a range of potential biometric and psychometric confounds. Overall, social support was found to be associated with reduced resting cardiovascular function independently of, and to a greater extent than, biometric variables, anxiety, and depression. Benchmarking these effects against the differences in cardiovascular function between the present sample and a group of 92 similarly aged males revealed that social support accounted for as much variance as gender, which is widely assumed to be an important biomedical determinant of blood pressure. Such findings corroborate assertions that social support influences disease risk in ways that involve direct psychosomatic mechanisms.

Keywords:

• social support
• cardiovascular function
• life stress
• anxiety
• depression

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by grants from the Irish Heart Foundation, from the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, and from the Millennium Research Fund at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian M. Hughes

In 2007, Brian M. Hughes received an Early Career Award from the Stress and Anxiety Research Society