Feeling lonely probably won’t kill you, but genuine social isolation might, researchers discover

Feeling lonely contributes less to the risk of cardiovascular disease than recent research suggests, scientists said Tuesday, but social isolation really does increase the odds of dying after a heart attack or stroke.

The alleged link between loneliness and heart disease essentially disappears once other well-known risk factors – smoking, drinking, poor diet, lack of exercise – are factored in, according to a study that monitored nearly 480,000 men and women in Britain for seven years.

Likewise the supposed impact of feeling friendless on premature death.

But even after bad lifestyle habits are taken into consideration, social isolation – time actually spent alone – boosted the risk of dying by about thirty per cent in people who suffered a stroke or heart attack, according to the study, published in Heart, a medical journal.

“Social isolation, but not loneliness … remained as an independent risk factor for mortality,” the researchers, led by Christian Hakulinen, a professor at the University of Helsinki, concluded.

Earlier efforts to tease out the influence of a solitary existence on cardiovascular disease and heart-related mortality had produced mixed results, in part due to the relatively small number of people covered.

For the new study, Hakulinen and his team drew from the so-called Biobank cohort, in which 479,054 people aged 40 to 69 were monitored for seven years.

“To the best of our knowledge, our study is the largest on the topic,” they wrote.