'New study casts doubt on loneliness as a cause of many diseases'

 A team of medical researchers has found via analysis of patient data from multiple sources, that many diseases that have been thought attributable to loneliness are more likely due to other causes. The work is published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The researchers, from The Affiliated Brain Hospital, 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 another from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in the U.S.

Prior research has shown that there is a link between loneliness and some mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety and insomnia. And some other research has suggested it goes even further than that, causing non-mental health problems such as high blood pressure, digestion problems and even premature death.

In this new study, the research team has found evidence showing that some ailments that have been tied to loneliness are much more likely to be due to something else.

In looking into the possibility of loneliness as the cause of non-mental health problems, the researchers turned to multiple biomedical databases holding information on hundreds of thousands of patients in the U.S., China and the U.K. They found that patients who reported feeling lonely did seem to be at a higher risk of developing 30 out of 56 preselected conditions.

The researchers then performed statistical analysis on 26 of the 30 conditions on just those patients whose genetic data was available. They found that many of the diseases that had been believed to be caused or acerbated by loneliness, were in fact due to other causes. Most of them, the team found, occurred in conjunction with loneliness, not because of it.

The team concludes by suggesting that it does appear to be the case that loneliness can cause, or lead to a host of mental ailments, and that it may play a role in some other issues, such as the development of inflammation or changes to hormone levels, which can lead to a variety of problems.

They suggest more research needs to be done to identify which ailments truly are related to loneliness, or social isolation, and which are merely incidental.

More information: Yannis Yan Liang et al, Observational and genetic evidence disagree on the association between loneliness and risk of multiple diseases, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01970-0

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