From reading this it seems to me there is a wide gap between what happens at the molecular level and the social level, and they are very eager to jump it?
Anecdotally I agree with the message, but the research looks weak indeed.
A simple snapshot assessment and some scoring of an individual's (entire, self-reported!) social life is too simplistic. The measurements would have to be performed throughout the life of each participant with sufficiently high frequency.
For what it's worth, the dataset they used does in fact have measurements spanning 30 years of adulthood, and similar papers from that dataset leveraging the longitudinal data have found similar conclusions.
Why it happens is less clear. It could be stress effects, or it could be something like people with more social support are more likely to get help going in for preventative care etc.
Social ties correlate with all kinds of beneficial traits, outcomes and privileges, in a very complex and bidirectional causal relation: sociable people have much better economic and career prospects, healthy middle class people have the opportunity, time and resources to engage in social activities, raising a family is a high energy activity not everybody can afford that basically "generates" a substantial web of social links, which in turn support the person in their gray years, and so on and so forth.
So the finding here is that healthy, wealthy people with a support network age just like healthy, wealthy people with a support network.
> All models adjusted for demographic and socioeconomic variables selected a priori for their potential to confound associations between CSA and biological aging indicators. Covariates included age (in years), sex (male vs. female), race/ethnicity (White, Black, Other), educational attainment (12-point ordinal scale), and log-transformed current household income (USD). These variables were treated as exogenous predictors—assumed to temporally precede both CSA and biological outcomes—and were included to block potential backdoor paths and minimize bias.
> [...]
> Educational attainment and income reflect stratified access to material and psychosocial resources that affect both health behavior and biological risk processes (Adler and Newman, 2002). Treating these covariates as exogenous minimizes bias due to confounding while avoiding over-adjustment for potential mediators or introducing collider bias (Schisterman et al., 2009).
from a certain perspective, they've found that if I tell you nothing more about a person than their lab test results on some biomarkers, you can make a better-than-random educated guess about how much social connection they have in their lives.
that's kind of interesting, though very far from the causal claims in the university press release.
