The complicated role loneliness plays in 26 common health conditions
Loneliness was long thought to cause health conditions ranging from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, but new research paints a more nuanced picture
By Rachel Nuwer
16 September 2024
Loneliness is associated with multiple health conditions
Marc Bruxelle RF / Alamy
The idea that loneliness leads to certain health conditions is now being called into question. Although loneliness is associated with a range of negative physical health outcomes, including an increased risk of premature death, it might just be correlated with many of the conditions it was previously assumed to cause.
“Loneliness seems to act as more of an indicator of disease rather than a direct cause,” says Jihui Zhang at Guangzhou Medical University. “Instead, socioeconomic factors, lifestyle choices and genetic predisposition might be driving risk for diseases like diabetes and heart diseases.”
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Social connection is essential to our mental health and ability to thrive. Yet loneliness – the painful feeling that arises from social disconnection – affects a growing number of people around the world.
To learn more about how this affects health, Zhang and his colleagues analysed data from several biomedical databases, including the medical information of 476,100 people in the UK, 16,000 in China and 14,000 in the US. They found that participants who reported feelings of loneliness were at a higher risk of 30 out of 56 individual conditions, ranging from cancers to digestive system conditions.
Then the researchers performed a second round of statistical analysis on 26 of those 30 conditions, focusing on the subset of participants whose genetic data was available. The results revealed that most of the conditions were not, in fact, caused by loneliness. These health problems, including cardiovascular disease, obesity and type 2 diabetes, merely occurred alongside loneliness. But loneliness could still potentially play some role in causing six of the conditions: depression, hypothyroidism, asthma, sleep apnea, substance abuse and hearing loss.
