WASHINGTON — Is feeling alone the greatest health problem Americans face? While the obesity epidemic has long been front-and-center in major cities across the U.S., new research finds that loneliness and social isolation is an even greater public health threat than being overweight.
Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University conducted two meta-analyses of previous studies to determine how social isolation, loneliness, and living alone plays a role in a person's risk of dying.
In an analysis of 148 studies that included more than 300,000 people total, her research team found that ”a greater social connection" cuts a person's risk of early death by 50 percent.
”Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need — crucial to both well-being and survival. Extreme examples show infants in custodial care who lack human contact fail to thrive and often die, and indeed, social isolation or solitary confinement has been used as a form of punishment," says Holt-Lunstad in an American Psychological Association press release. ”Yet an increasing portion of the U.S. population now experiences isolation regularly."
In her second analysis, she looked at the role that loneliness, social isolation, and living alone played in a person's lifespan. Using 70 studies that included more than 3.4 million participants (mostly from North America, but some studies did look at people in Europe, Asia, and Australia), the research team concluded that all three were as much of — and in some cases more — a threat to a person's health as obesity and other risk factors.
All three conditions were found to be equally hazardous and significantly raised the risk of premature death.
