SynthesisJournal of behavioral medicine2023
Social support and telomere length: a meta-analysis.
Synthesis in Journal of behavioral medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Implementation of Health Empowerment Theory-Based Personalized Health Promotion in Village Health Volunteer Risk Group for Non-Communicable Diseases: A Mixed-Methods Study.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Social support and epigenetic aging at the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender: findings from NHANES 1999-2002.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Infant buccal telomere length: associations with maternal distress in pregnancy and offspring temperament.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Sex-specific modulating role of social support in the associations between oxidative stress, inflammation, and telomere length in older adults.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2024Article
- Methods for Assessing Health Outcomes Associated with Food Insecurity in the United States College Student Population: A Narrative Review.Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Review
- Birds of a feather age together: telomere dynamics and social behavior predict life span in female Japanese quailFrontiers in endocrinology · 2024Article
- Absent Relations of Religious Coping to Telomere Length in African American and White Women and Men.Experimental aging researchArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that lower social support is associated with higher all-cause mortality (Holt-Lunstad et al. in PLoS ONE Medicine 7:e1000316, 2010). While social support has been associated with system-specific biological measures (e.g., cardiovascular), there is the need to elucidate more general biological mechanisms linking social support to health risk across a number of diseases. In this meta-analytic review, the link between social support and telomere length (Cawthon et al. in Lancet 361:393-395, 2003) was conducted based on the updated PRISMA guidelines (Page et al., 2021). Across 17 studies, higher social support was not significantly related to longer telomere length (Zr = 0.010, 95% CI [- 0.028, 0.047], p > 0.05). The confidence interval indicated that the bulk of plausible values were small to null associations. Little evidence for bias was found as shown by funnel plots and Kendall's Tau. Moderator analyses focusing on the measure of support, health of sample, age, type of assay specimen, and gender were not significant. In conclusion, this review showed no significant relationship between social support and telomere length and highlights important future directions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.