Loneliness Could Be Making You Sick

It’s no surprise that isolation and loneliness affect our overall mental health. In fact, research suggests that an individual’s sense of community can reduce distressing mental and emotional symptoms like anxiety and depression.

Now, a new study has also found that loneliness is linked to poor physical health—specifically affecting a person’s protein levels.

Using data from 42,062 participants in the UK Biobank, researchers measured different protein levels in the individuals’ blood to understand how social isolation and loneliness affected them.

“In simple models incorporating age, sex, site, technical factors, and the first 20 genetic principal components (PCs) as covariates, we found 776 proteins significantly associated with social isolation and 519 proteins associated with loneliness,” study authors wrote in the journal Nature.

“We found around 90 percent of these proteins are linked to the risk of mortality,” said Dr. Chun Shen, the first author of the research, from Fudan University in China, per The Guardian. 

loneliness is linked to disease

The study authors also analyzed data tracking the participants’ health over 14 years.

“Notably, more than half of these proteins were prospectively linked to CVD [cardiovascular disease], T2D [type 2 diabetes], stroke, and mortality during a 14-year follow-up,” they wrote.

The research specified that heightened levels of protein did not seem to cause loneliness and isolation, but rather the other way around, with loneliness influencing the levels of five proteins.

“I think the message is that we’ve got to start to get people to realize that it’s part of a health thing, both for their mental health and their wellbeing but also for their physical health, that they have to remain connected with other people,” said Professor Barbara Sahakian, a co-author of the study at the University of Cambridge, per The Guardian.