SERIOUS MEDICINE; GURU OF PREVENTION HAS HEALTHY RESPECT FOR THE POWER OF LOVE.

Byline: Liz Kowalczyk Freedom News Service

Dr. Dean Ornish, America's guru of prevention, is talking and gesturing with his left hand, and something isn't making sense.

A simple gold band on his ring finger gleams in the morning sun flowing through the picture window of his hotel room. Yet Ornish isn't getting married until June. So what's up?

``It's an engagement ring,'' Ornish explains. ``It's a symbol of love and commitment. If she's wearing one, why shouldn't I?''

Ornish, 44, takes love that seriously.

In fact, the doctor who is changing how American physicians treat heart disease not only believes love will heal him emotionally. He's adamant that intimacy helps heal the physical ills of others - the common cold, heart disease, even cancer.

``The general health of our country has improved, but those who feel lonely, depressed or isolated are three to five times more likely to suffer premature death or disease,'' says Ornish, who discussed his latest book ``Love and Survival,'' during part of a 15-city book tour.

``I don't know of anything else across medicine that has such a broad and powerful impact.''

Ornish has written four previous best sellers and is widely known for his nontraditional approach to treating heart disease, one that eschews surgery for an extremely low-fat diet, exercise and support groups.

In his fifth book, Ornish cites dozens of intriguing studies conducted during the past two decades, bringing to the popular consciousness one of the most interesting areas of medical research: How do people's social networks affect their resistance to and survival of disease?

It's a question that has fascinated cardiologists, immunologists and psychologists since the famous Roseto study.

Parallel lifestyles

During the 1950s and 1960s, residents of this small eastern Pennsylvania town rarely died from heart disease, unlike their neighbors in Bangor. Men and women in the two communities saw the same doctors, ate the same foods and exercised as often.

The difference was that residents of Roseto, a tightly knit Italian immigrant community, had stronger family and community relationships. When those ties frayed in the 1970s, the people of Roseto began dying of heart disease at the same rate as their neighbors.

Since then, several studies have suggested a strong connection between companionship and health.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh exposed healthy adults to viruses and found that those with many kinds of social relationships were four times less likely to catch colds.

At Harvard University, students who reported that they did not have warm relationships with their mothers were more likely to be diagnosed with a major disease in midlife than students who said they were close to their moms.

``When you take everything together, the data is pretty good,'' says Peter Kaufmann, head of the behavioral medicine group at the National Institutes of Health's Heart Lung and Blood Institute. ``Having someone in your life to talk to has a pretty strong effect on your health.''

While some doctors privately criticize Ornish for capitalizing on an idea he didn't invent, he says social support has been a key component of his heart prevention program for years. Forty major insurance companies cover his program as an alternative to surgery, and Medicare officials are weighing it as an option for the nation's elderly.

``It's always been a part of my work, but people tend not to focus on it,'' he says. ``Over time we realized we had created a community for people. So few of them had a place they could be open and authentic.''

Something so intuitive

Doctors practicing on the front lines have been slow to accept nontraditional forms of healing, most notably acupuncture, massage and prayer. But there's something so intuitive about the idea that love heals that even physicians in the most traditional fields are taking patients' relationships into account during treatment.

``I see it all the time,'' says Dr. Jeffrey Milliken, chief of the division of cardiothoracic surgery at University of California, Irvine, Medical Center in Orange County. ``People in relationships and people in supportive environments live longer and are less disease-prone.''

Milliken says he sees the impact of social support on patients who undergo open-heart surgery. UCI offers a rapid discharge program to patients who have had coronary bypass operations and other procedures. They go home in two or three days. Patients on the regular discharge schedule leave the hospital in seven or eight days.

Many factors influence whether a patient can go home early, but one key determinant is his social support network, Milliken says. A patient recovering from major surgery needs family and friends to change his sheets, make sure he takes his medicine, rent him videos and call the doctor if his condition worsens.

Ornish says earlier studies of social networks focused on such practical means of support. But, he says, more recent research eliminates these factors and reveals a subtler dynamic at work: Just feeling cared for and loved might help one heal.

John Conn, 75, a patient of Milliken's, describes how it worked for him. Conn underwent a heart valve replacement and double bypass surgery on Feb. 19. After five days he went home - to his live-in love, Jeanette DeJohn, and three doting daughters.

``They kept saying, `Dad, you're doing so well.' And Jeanette would kiss me on the cheek all the time,'' Conn says. ``They kept me happy. They made me feel loved, and they kept me thinking positively. A person's brain is an unusual thing. Negative thinking can really hurt you.''

How does it work?

Scientists who study the impact of social relationships on health aren't sure exactly how support works.

``Why relationships matter is a mystery,'' Ornish says.

Kaufmann says one possibility is that people without close friends and family don't take good care of themselves and engage in more risky behaviors: smoking, eating fatty food and watching television rather than working out. Even when researchers control for those factors, Kaufmann says, it's impossible to eliminate the variables that could influence a person's health.

But, he says, the more promising theory is that companionship buffers people against stress, which in turn improves their immune systems.

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the division of health psychology studies at Ohio State University, has looked at immune-system function in feuding married couples, stressed-out college students and people who are caring for sick parents. ``Personal relationships are related to immune function,'' she says. ``And we know that immune function plays a role in wound healing and infectious diseases. The jury is still out on cancer.''

Because there are so many unanswered questions, doctors worry that Ornish might be overstating his case.

``I would not say if you're in a bad relationship you're doomed. We put ourselves at risk if we embrace something like this so completely that we think it's going to cure us of heart disease,'' Kaufmann says. ``It's one factor. If we foster those kinds of relationships with others around us we are likely to bring benefits to them and to ourselves.''

Ornish is taking the advice to heart.

Having turned down academic and commercial opportunities, Ornish says he remains a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, to spend time with his fiancee, Molly Blackwell, 36. They will be married in June.

``I'm saying no to a lot of things,'' he says. ``I want to have a life. I want to be a father. Those things are important to me.''

Presence of love promotes health

Some findings about affection:

Men and women in Alameda County who did not have close contact with friends, relatives, spouses, and church and social groups were 1.9 percent to 3.1 percent more likely to die prematurely than those who did. Social ties were a more powerful predictor of health and longevity than age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, health status, smoking, drinking, overeating or lack of exercise.

In a study that traced 126 Harvard University students, 91 percent of those who said they did not have warm relationships with their mothers were diagnosed in midlife with ulcers, heart disease and other serious illnesses. In contrast, young men who rated their relationships with their moms as warm had only a 45 percent chance of getting sick.

Researchers gave 276 healthy men and women nasal drops containing a virus that causes the common cold. Those with the greatest variety of relationships - spouses, parents, friends, co-workers, members of social groups and volunteer activities - were less likely to get sick. Those reporting only one to three types of relationships had more than four times the risk of developing a cold than those reporting six or more types of relationships.

More than 1,400 men and women who underwent coronary angiography and were found to have had at least one blocked coronary artery were studied five years after their diagnoses. Those who were unmarried and did not have a close confidant were more than three times as likely to have died during that period than those who were married, had someone to talk to on a regular basis, or both.

- Freedom News Service

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) LOVE IS THE DRUG

Photo Illustration by Traci Wooden/Daily News

(2) In his latest book, Dr. Dean Ornish cites dozens of intriguing studies, bringing to the popular consciousness one of the most interesting areas of medical research: How do people's social networks affect their resistance to and survival of disease?

Michael Kitada/Orange County Register

Box: Presence of love promotes health (See Text)