HIGHER LEVELS OF SOCIAL SUPPORT PREDICT GREATER SURVIVAL FOLLOWING ACUTE MYOCARDIAL-INFARCTION - THE CORPUS-CHRISTI HEART PROJECT

Although low levels of social support have been related to mortality f rom coronary heart disease, little is known about the role of social s upport among Mexican Americans. The authors therefore examined the rel ationship between social support and long-term survival in the Corpus Christi Heart Project. They developed a social support scale that used data collected during in-hospital interviews of 292 Mexican Americans and 304 non-Hispanic Whites who survived a myocardial infarction for more than 28 days. The scale incorporated three measures: marital stat us; if not married, whether living alone; and whether advised to seek help. During an average follow-up period of 43 months, 115 participant s died. Survival following myocardial infarction was greater for those with high or medium social support than for those with low social sup port. With age, gender ethnicity, education, employment smoking, diabe tes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia included in a proportional hazards regression model, the relative risk of mortality was 1.89 (95 % CI, 1.20-2.97)for those with low social support. But when the two et hnic groups were analyzed separately, low social support was no longer a significant predictor of mortality for non-Hispanic Whites, whereas for Mexican Americans, the relative risk of mortality was 3.38 (95% C I, 1.73-6.62) for those with low social support.