Research Topics
| Nicholas A ChristakisSummaryAffiliation: Harvard University Country: USA Publications
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Detail Information
Publications
Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behaviorNicholas A Christakis
Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, U S A
Stat Med 32:556-77. 2013....
The collective dynamics of smoking in a large social networkNicholas A Christakis
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
N Engl J Med 358:2249-58. 2008..We examined the extent of the person-to-person spread of smoking behavior and the extent to which groups of widely connected people quit together...
The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 yearsNicholas A Christakis
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
N Engl J Med 357:370-9. 2007..The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic...- Don't just blame the systemNicholas A Christakis
BMJ 336:747. 2008 - The health impact of health care on families: a matched cohort study of hospice use by decedents and mortality outcomes in surviving, widowed spousesNicholas A Christakis
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Soc Sci Med 57:465-75. 2003..Health care may have positive, group-level health "externalities": it may affect the health not only of patients but also of patients' family members... - The spread of alcohol consumption behavior in a large social networkJ Niels Rosenquist
Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Boston University School of Medicine, 180 A Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Ann Intern Med 152:426-33, W141. 2010..Alcohol consumption has important health-related consequences and numerous biological and social determinants... - Mortality after the hospitalization of a spouseNicholas A Christakis
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and the Palliative Care Service, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, USA
N Engl J Med 354:719-30. 2006..The illness of a spouse can affect the health of a caregiving partner. We examined the association between the hospitalization of a spouse and a partner's risk of death among elderly people... - Care after the onset of serious illness: a novel claims-based dataset exploiting substantial cross-set linkages to study end-of-life careNicholas A Christakis
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
J Palliat Med 5:515-29. 2002..Detailed health information about cohort members' spouses was also collected. We conclude by highlighting the types of analyses that can be conducted in this data set... - Social network sensors for early detection of contagious outbreaksNicholas A Christakis
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS ONE 5:e12948. 2010..The amount of lead time will depend on features of the outbreak and the network at hand. The method could in principle be generalized to other biological, psychological, informational, or behavioral contagions that spread in networks... - When networks can teach us about drug useNicholas A Christakis
Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
BMJ 336:420. 2008 - Measuring clinically significant chemotherapy-related toxicities using Medicare claims from Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) trial participantsElizabeth B Lamont
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Med Care 46:303-8. 2008..Because the elderly are underrepresented on clinical trials, physicians have few sources of information to estimate the risks (ie, toxicities) and benefits of chemotherapy administration to the elderly... - Measuring disease-free survival and cancer relapse using Medicare claims from CALGB breast cancer trial participants (companion to 9344)Elizabeth B Lamont
Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Institute for Technology Assessment, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
J Natl Cancer Inst 98:1335-8. 2006.... - Variation in patient-sharing networks of physicians across the United StatesBruce E Landon
Department of Health Care Policy, School of Medicine, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
JAMA 308:265-73. 2012..Physicians are embedded in informal networks that result from their sharing of patients, information, and behaviors... - Mapping physician networks with self-reported and administrative dataMichael L Barnett
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Health Serv Res 46:1592-609. 2011..To assess whether connections between physicians based on shared patients in administrative data correspond with professional relationships between physicians... - Reasons for choice of referral physician among primary care and specialist physiciansMichael L Barnett
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
J Gen Intern Med 27:506-12. 2012..For a given clinical problem, referring physicians usually have a choice of several physicians to whom they can refer. Once the decision to refer is made, the choice of individual physician may have important downstream effects... - Physician patient-sharing networks and the cost and intensity of care in US hospitalsMichael L Barnett
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Med Care 50:152-60. 2012..There is substantial variation in the cost and intensity of care delivered by US hospitals. We assessed how the structure of patient-sharing networks of physicians affiliated with hospitals might contribute to this variation... - Parental influence on substance use in adolescent social networksHolly B Shakya
Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, USA
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 166:1132-9. 2012..To evaluate the relationship between the parenting style of an adolescent's peers' parents and an adolescent's substance use... - Evolution of in-group favoritismFeng Fu
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
Sci Rep 2:460. 2012..Our framework also allows us to implement different games for these two types of interactions. We prove general results and derive specific conditions for the evolution of cooperation based on in-group favoritism... - The lack of effect of market structure on hospice useTheodore J Iwashyna
Department of Medicine, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, USA
Health Serv Res 37:1531-51. 2002.... - Minimal social network effects evident in cancer screening behaviorNancy L Keating
Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Cancer 117:3045-52. 2011..Social networks may influence screening behaviors. We assessed whether screening for breast, prostate, or colorectal cancer is influenced by the actual screening behaviors of siblings, friends, spouses, and coworkers... - Marriage, widowhood, and health-care useTheodore J Iwashyna
Department of Medicine, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, PA, USA
Soc Sci Med 57:2137-47. 2003..We suggest that these patterns are most consistent with spouses exerting their benefits by functioning as higher-order decision-makers than as home health assistants... - Egocentric social network structure, health, and pro-social behaviors in a national panel study of AmericansA James O'Malley
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS ONE 7:e36250. 2012.... - Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherersCoren L Apicella
Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
Nature 481:497-501. 2012..Also, early humans may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin, based in part on their tendency to cooperate. Social networks may thus have contributed to the emergence of cooperation... - Proximity to food establishments and body mass index in the Framingham Heart Study offspring cohort over 30 yearsJason P Block
Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Harvard Medical School, 133 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Am J Epidemiol 174:1108-14. 2011.... - Complexities in prognostication in advanced cancer: "to help them live their lives the way they want to"Elizabeth B Lamont
Section of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, and the Cancer Research Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
JAMA 290:98-104. 2003..Using the vignette of a real patient with advanced cancer who far outlived her physician's prognostic estimate, we discuss clinical issues related to the science of prognosis in advanced cancer and the art of its disclosure... - Criterion validity of Medicare chemotherapy claims in Cancer and Leukemia Group B breast and lung cancer trial participantsElizabeth B Lamont
Department of Medicine and Institute for Technology Assessment, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA
J Natl Cancer Inst 97:1080-3. 2005..Administrative Medicare claims data appear to be a valid source of information for chemotherapy administered to elderly Medicare beneficiaries with cancer... - Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humansDavid G Rand
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Department of Psychology, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108:19193-8. 2011..Our experiments confirm the predictions of a set of evolutionary game theoretic models and demonstrate the important role that dynamic social networks can play in supporting large-scale human cooperation... - A dynamic network approach for the study of human phenotypesCésar A Hidalgo
Center for International Development and Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS Comput Biol 5:e1000353. 2009..The dataset introduced here, released concurrently with this publication, represents the largest relational phenotypic resource publicly available to the research community... - Emotions as infectious diseases in a large social network: the SISa modelAlison L Hill
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Proc Biol Sci 277:3827-35. 2010..Our model provides a theoretical framework for studying the interpersonal spread of any state that may also arise spontaneously, such as emotions, behaviours, health states, ideas or diseases with reservoirs... - Medicine may change our genesNicholas A Christakis
Harvard Medical School, USA
BMJ 336:1101. 2008 - The evolution of homophilyFeng Fu
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Sci Rep 2:845. 2012..The results show that homophily tends to evolve under a wide variety of conditions, helping to explain its ubiquity in nature... - Viral perturbations of host networks reflect disease etiologyNatali Gulbahce
Center for Complex Networks Research CCNR and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS Comput Biol 8:e1002531. 2012..The topological proximity found between cellular targets of viral proteins and disease genes was exploited to uncover a novel pathway linking HPV to Fanconi anemia... - Spreading paths in partially observed social networksJukka Pekka Onnela
Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys 85:036106. 2012..We find that the partially observed shortest path does not necessarily give an inflated estimate of the length of the process path; in fact, partial observation may, counterintuitively, make the path seem shorter than it actually is... - Infectious disease modeling of social contagion in networksAlison L Hill
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS Comput Biol 6:e1000968. 2010..It provides a theoretical framework for studying the interpersonal spread of any state that may also arise spontaneously, such as emotions, behaviors, health states, ideas or diseases with reservoirs... - Longitudinal analysis of large social networks: estimating the effect of health traits on changes in friendship tiesA James O'Malley
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Stat Med 30:950-64. 2011..We also validated previously known findings regarding homophily on age and gender, and found evidence that homophily also depends upon geographic separation... - Disease-specific patterns of hospice and related healthcare use in an incidence cohort of seriously ill elderly patientsTheodore J Iwashyna
Department of Medicine, Hospital of the University at Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
J Palliat Med 5:531-8. 2002..7%. Among decedents with cancer diagnoses, rates vary from 15.2% to 35.2%. For the cohort overall, 14.2% of male decedents and 12.4% of female decedents used hospice. Patterns of end-of-life care vary substantially according to diagnosis... - On the prospects for a blame-free medical cultureMolly E Collins
Department of Medicine, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America
Soc Sci Med 69:1287-90. 2009..Given that physicians' ideology of self-blame is ingrained, accompanied by benefits, and limits a systems perspective on error, it may subvert attempts to establish a blame-free culture... - Association between widowhood and risk of diagnosis with a sexually transmitted infection in older adultsKirsten P Smith
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Am J Public Health 99:2055-62. 2009.... - Too quietly into the nightNicholas A Christakis
Harvard Medical School, USA
BMJ 337:a696. 2008 - Racial, ethnic, and affluence differences in elderly patients' use of teaching hospitalsTheodore J Iwashyna
Department of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Philadelphia, USA
J Gen Intern Med 17:696-703. 2002..To understand the role of race, ethnicity, and affluence in elderly patients' use of teaching hospitals when they have that option... - Geographic constraints on social network groupsJukka Pekka Onnela
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
PLoS ONE 6:e16939. 2011..Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints... - The impact of cellular networks on disease comorbidityJuyong Park
Department of Physics, Biology, and Computer Science, Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Mol Syst Biol 5:262. 2009..Our results indicate that such a combination of population-level data and cellular network information could help build novel hypotheses about disease mechanisms... - Favorable cardiac risk among elderly breast carcinoma survivorsElizabeth B Lamont
Section of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
Cancer 98:2-10. 2003..First, estrogens may be etiologic in the development of breast carcinoma and protective of CHD. Second, a common therapy for breast carcinoma (tamoxifen) may be associated with cardiac protection... - Valuing the well connectedNicholas A Christakis
Harvard Medical School, USA
BMJ 337:a1675. 2008 - Health care in a webNicholas A Christakis
Harvard Medical School, USA
BMJ 336:1468. 2008 - Neighborhood effects on posthospitalization mortality: a population-based cohort study of the elderly in ChicagoMing Wen
Department of Sociology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
Health Serv Res 40:1108-27. 2005..Myocardial infarction in particular may be a "neighborhood sensitive" condition. Individuals' health may depend not just on individuals' characteristics but also on their neighborhoods'... - The emotional toll of spousal morbidity and mortalityKara Zivin
Veterans Affairs, Health Services Research and Development, Serious Mental Illness Treatment Research and Evaluation Center, Ann Arbor, MI 48113 0170, USA
Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 15:772-9. 2007.... - Identifying, recruiting, and retaining seriously-ill patients and their caregivers in longitudinal researchKaren E Steinhauser
Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care, Durham VA Medical Center, Duke University, NC 27705, USA
Palliat Med 20:745-54. 2006..The palliative care literature is replete with descriptions of studies unable to meet enrollment goals, and that as a result, do not have adequate power to test hypotheses or draw conclusions... - The effect of widowhood on mortality by the causes of death of both spousesFelix Elwert
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Am J Public Health 98:2092-8. 2008..We investigated the effect of spousal bereavement on mortality to document cause-specific bereavement effects by the causes of death of both the predecedent spouse and the bereaved partner... - Construct validity of medicare chemotherapy claims: the case of 5FUElizabeth B Lamont
Section of Hematology-Oncology, University of Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
Med Care 40:201-11. 2002..Criterion validation studies with an external gold standard should be pursued to determine the sensitivity and specificity of chemotherapy codes in the Medicare NCH files... - Geographic variation in hospice use in the United States in 2002Stephen R Connor
National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, Alexandria, Virginia 22314, USA
J Pain Symptom Manage 34:277-85. 2007..State-specific usage rates ranged from 8% in Alaska to 49% in Arizona. Our findings highlight opportunities for the hospice industry to provide more care, opportunities defined by diagnostic and geographic axes... - "Are you at peace?": one item to probe spiritual concerns at the end of lifeKaren E Steinhauser
Centers for Palliative Care, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Department of Medicine, Division of Geriatrics, School of Nursing, Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Duke University, Durham, NC 27705, USA
Arch Intern Med 166:101-5. 2006..A practical, evidence-based approach to discussing spiritual concerns in a scope suitable to a physician-patient relationship may improve the quality of the clinical encounter... - Income inequality and weight status in US metropolitan areasVirginia W Chang
Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, Philadelphia VAMC, USA
Soc Sci Med 61:83-96. 2005..Although our findings are suggestive of a contextual effect of metropolitan area income inequality, we do not find an increased risk for unhealthy weight outcomes, adding to recent debates surrounding this topic... - Social networks and collateral health effectsNicholas A Christakis
BMJ 329:184-5. 2004 - Initial assessment of a new instrument to measure quality of life at the end of lifeKaren E Steinhauser
Program on the Medical Encounter and Palliative Care, Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care, Durham VA Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27705, USA
J Palliat Med 5:829-41. 2002..We conducted this study to pilot a new multidimensional instrument to assess the quality of life at the end of life... - Prospective effect of community distress and subcultural orientation on mortality following life-threatening diseases in later lifeMing Wen
Department of Sociology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 0250, USA
Sociol Health Illn 28:558-82. 2006..The social, economic, physical and cultural environment in which people live appears to exert a significant impact on whether older people facing life-threatening illness live or die...