Smoking has always been a social habit, but U.S. researchers said on Wednesday act of quitting is a social activity too, which passes through a social network like an outbreak of flu.
The findings, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, come from 32 years of data from a network of more than 12,000 people who participated in the Framingham Heart Study.
"This study tells us that social relationships have a critical impact on health behaviours and decisions, and that people are strongly influenced by those in their social sphere," said National Institute on Aging director Dr. Richard Hodes, whose institute paid for the study.
"We've found that when you analyze large social networks, entire pockets of people who might not know each other all quit smoking at once," Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston said in a statement. "What appears to happen is that people quit in droves."
Husbands are likely to pass it on to their wives, or vice versa. When someone quits, his or her spouse is 67 percent less likely to continue smoking.
Quitters influenced their brothers or sisters -- siblings were 25 percent less likely to smoke if one of them quit, while the friend of someone who kicked the habit was 36 percent less likely to smoke.
Even co-workers are influential -- in small firms, a quitter could decrease smoking among peers by 34 percent.
Such ripple effects among social groups may seem pretty obvious — people naturally look to their friends to figure out what behaviors are socially acceptable.
Christakis's research, for example, shows that geographical distance between individuals in the network doesn't seem to weaken behavioral influences.
That means that prevention and treatment programs for health-related behaviors such as quitting smoking, losing weight and exercising could become more efficient by taking advantage of the network effect.
Source: Xinhua/Agencies
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