Children who are popular at school not only enjoy more friends and peer respect but also grow up to be healthier adults, a 30-year Swedish study has found.
Youngsters with fewer friends and less social status are far more prone to heart disease and diabetes as adults and are at a greater risk of suicide and drug dependency.
The study by Stockholm University and the Karolinska Institute tracked more than 14,000 children born in Sweden between 1953 and 2003 to see if childhood status in school had any links with disease-specific morbidity in adulthood.
"The exposure to expectations and access to resources that accompany any given peer status position are likely to have a long-term impact on the child's identity, behaviour and ambitions," said the researchers. "This may in turn affect health development," they added in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
For the study, the children were assessed in Grade 6. This information was then matched to data on hospital admissions recorded from 1973 to 2003.
The less popular children were four times as likely to be hospitalized for diseases such as diabetes. They were also more than twice as likely to develop mental-health and problems and significantly more prone to drug and alcohol abuse and heart disease.
