- Social isolation and loneliness are both associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, finds an expansive new meta-study.
- In addition, among people with cancer, social isolation and loneliness are linked to a higher risk of death.
- For people with heart disease, social isolation, not loneliness, is associated with a higher mortality risk.
A new study confirms an association between social isolation, loneliness, and mortality.
The authors investigated how the two phenomena were linked to all-cause deaths and deaths from cardiovascular disease and breast cancer.
The large meta analysis found that being socially isolated was associated with a 26% increase in the risk of all-cause death compared to people who were not socially isolated.
The effect of loneliness was slightly less but still concerning: The chance of death for people experiencing prolonged loneliness was 14% higher than for people who were not lonely.
Both social isolation and loneliness were linked to an increase in the likelihood of all-cause and cancer deaths. Social isolation was also associated with an increased risk of death for people with cardiovascular disease.
The meta-study analyzed the findings of 90 separate studies involving 2,205,199 people.
The analysis is published in
One of the interesting aspects of the study is social isolation’s greater effect on mortality than loneliness. The two conditions might seem similar. However, they are not the same:
- The study defines “social isolation” as “an objective lack of (or limited) social contact with other people, and is characterized by a person having a limited social network, having infrequent social contacts, or possibly living alone.”
- “Loneliness,” on the other hand, is “a subjective feeling of distress, arising when there is a discrepancy…
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