Let’s talk about loneliness.
The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection reported last year that about 16% of people worldwide experience loneliness, and linked it to roughly 871,000 deaths a year.
For researchers who study loneliness, there’s a chicken-and-egg question:
Does loneliness cause poor health, especially mental health?
Or does poor mental health simply make people lonely to begin with?
Now, a team from the University of Bristol, working with Nesta, Amsterdam UMC, Oxford, and Manchester, is trying to find the answer.
Their study, published last month in Nature Communications, drew on genome-wide association studies involving as many as 2 million people, along with data from as many as 414,432 people in the UK Biobank.
They measured depression and anxiety using two standard clinical screening tools, the PHQ-9 and the GAD-7, plus separate formal diagnoses pulled from linked NHS medical records.
As for whether the people they studied were “lonely,” participants were simply asked whether they often felt lonely. Happiness, sense of meaning in life, and overall life satisfaction were measured separately as indicators of well-being.
In fairness, just asking people to self-report whether they’re lonely is a bit of a blunt instrument, and the researchers noted that they’d rather have been able to use a more detailed loneliness scale.
But they still had enough data to do some real analysis and draw conclusions—comparing the health outcomes of lonely people with those of non-lonely people, and then comparing siblings, on the theory that they could reduce the effects of growing up in the same household or having similar genes.
Finally, they used a technique called Mendelian randomization, comparing people with genetic traits linked to loneliness to see whether loneliness might contribute to later mental health problems, rather than simply result from them.
The researchers also drew a distinction between social isolation—the number and type of social connections you have—and loneliness—how you feel, regardless of how many people you interact with.
Bottom line, loneliness came out as the more damaging of the two.
Here’s Dr. Zoe Reed, a research fellow at the University of Bristol:
“Our findings suggest that loneliness, and possibly social isolation, are still important public health concerns, especially for mental health and general health.
Supporting people who feel lonely or socially isolated could help improve mental health, wellbeing and overall health.”
It’s funny; all the headlines on this story suggested that they figured out which comes first, the loneliness or the mental health challenges.
Drilling down, I’d say they concluded that loneliness really can come first—but that it can very quickly devolve into a vicious circle in which loneliness leads to more challenges, which lead to more loneliness and more challenges.
And since making someone less lonely might sometimes be easier than diagnosing and treating mental health issues, the idea is that addressing loneliness is one place we can start.
So have you been putting off a phone call, a coffee, or a check-in with someone? This might be a good impetus to act.
The upside seems real—maybe for you and them both.
Other things worth knowing …
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The Hill: The U.S. Navy is weighing a major revamp of its new class of aircraft carriers to better suit the aesthetics President Trump says he would prefer: specifically redesigning them to move the multistory aircraft carrier's command center tower, known as the "island," toward the middle of the vessel, so that they look more like older warships.
Business Insider: Oracle is planning a new round of layoffs this month as it borrows tens of billions of dollars to fund its AI data center buildout, with some teams facing double-digit percentage cuts. The company's workforce already shrank by about 21,000 people, or 13%, in the fiscal year ended May 31.
The Guardian: The chief economist at Russia’s second-largest bank has been fired after a series of critical comments about the state of the economy, including warnings that Moscow would not win a prolonged economic war with Ukraine. Andrei Klepach, who had served in the role at the state-controlled development bank VEB since 2014, was fired after Russian media reported on a scathing speech he had delivered to fellow economists in May.
The Guardian: Hayden Panettiere, the actor known for her roles in television shows such as Heroes and Nashville, has died at the age of 36. Panettiere’s death was confirmed in a statement from her representative to the Guardian after it was first reported on US network ABC News; no cause of death was given.
CNBC: Less than two weeks after a loss in New Mexico, Meta faces a much bigger legal test in a case brought by a coalition of 29 state attorneys general. The stakes are enormous as leading government officials across the country push for Meta to be held accountable for allegedly violating federal and state laws, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, and various consumer protection statutes.
ScienceDaily: Scientists at La Brea Tar Pits identified a new extinct amphibian species, a spadefoot toad named Spea labreae, after its bones sat unstudied in the museum's collections since the 1950s. It's only the second extinct Pleistocene amphibian ever found in North America, the other being a tree frog from Florida.
UPI: Disney announced that Harrison Ford is returning as Indiana Jones for a new ride at Florida's Animal Kingdom, and for the first time ever he's the actual model for the animatronic figure — "fear of snakes included," he said in a video announcement. The attraction, Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent, has no opening date yet.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Chris Buckwald on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!