Proportions of associations between loneliness and nine diseases attributable to different explanatory factors. Credit: Nature Human Behavior (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01970-0
A team of medical researchers has discovered, by analyzing patient data from multiple sources, that many illnesses thought to be attributable to loneliness are actually due to other causes. The work is published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
The researchers, from the Affiliated Brain Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, worked with three colleagues, one from the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, one from Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, all in China, and one from the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in the United States.
Previous research has shown that loneliness is linked to certain mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Other research suggests that this link goes even further, leading to non-mental health issues, such as high blood pressure, digestive problems, and even premature death.
In this new study, the research team found evidence that some illnesses linked to loneliness are much more likely to be caused by something else.
To investigate the possibility that loneliness could cause problems unrelated to mental health, the researchers turned to several biomedical databases containing information on hundreds of thousands of patients in the United States, China and the United Kingdom. They found that patients who reported feeling lonely appeared to have a higher risk of developing 30 of 56 pre-selected conditions.
The researchers then conducted a statistical analysis of 26 of the 30 conditions, only in patients whose genetic data were available. They found that many of the conditions thought to be caused or made worse by loneliness were actually due to other causes. Most of them, the team found, were related to loneliness, not because of it.
The team concludes by suggesting that it does appear that loneliness can cause or lead to a host of mental disorders, and that it may play a role in other problems, such as the development of inflammation or changes in hormone levels, which can lead to a variety of problems.
They suggest that more research needs to be done to identify which illnesses are actually linked to loneliness or social isolation and which are merely incidental.
More information:
Yannis Yan Liang et al, Observational and genetic evidence are inconsistent on the association between loneliness and risk of multiple diseases, Nature Human Behavior (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01970-0
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