Loneliness Trumps Obesity in Danger to Elderly
Researchers looking into the impact of feelings of isolation on older people found that loneliness can be twice as unhealthy as obesity.
Researchers looking into the impact of feelings of isolation on older people found that loneliness can be twice as unhealthy as obesity.
Ian Sample writes at The Guardian:
The scientists tracked more than 2,000 people aged 50 and over and found that the loneliest were nearly twice as likely to die during the six-year study than the least lonely.
Compared with the average person in the study, those who reported being lonely had a 14% greater risk of dying. The figure means that loneliness has around twice the impact on an early death as obesity. Poverty increased the risk of an early death by 19%.
The findings point to a coming crisis as the population ages and people increasingly live alone or far from their families. A study of loneliness in older Britons in 2012 found that more than a fifth felt lonely all the time, and a quarter became more lonely over five years. Half of those who took part in the survey said their loneliness was worse at weekends, and three-quarters suffered more at night.
Read more here.
— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.
Rock Solid JournalismIn 2026, amid chaos and the nonstop flurry of headlines, Truthdig remains independent, fact-based and focused on exposing what power tries to hide.
Support Independent Journalism.
Ear to the Ground
A card-writing program brings light to what can be a dark time of the year for prisoners.
A male-female imbalance of 70 million has upset big parts of society in the two countries, and the problem probably won’t improve for a long time.
Societies around the world are suffering epidemics of mental illness because “human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart.”
The "public face of social liberalism" is synonymous with "an endless list of things that you can't do or say or think, and with the constant threat of being called an existentially bad person if you say the wrong thing," journalist Freddie deBoer writes.
A 22-year-old man with apparent social difficulties is suspected of killing six people and injuring seven late Friday near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara.
Gregory Jordan (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Researchers are discovering some disturbing patterns between money and love these days. The rich, they’ve found, are getting wealthier by marrying other people in their income bracket, while the poor are getting poorer by doing the same. And the inequality created by this economy is wreaking havoc on love. AlterNet’s […]
You need to be a supporter to comment.
There are currently no responses to this article.
Be the first to respond.