New study casts doubt on the notion of loneliness as a cause of many diseases

A team of medical researchers has found, through analysis of patient data from multiple sources, that many illnesses thought to be caused by loneliness are more likely to be caused by other causes. The research is published in the journal Psychiatry nature human behavior,

Researchers from the Affiliated Brain Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University worked together with three colleagues, one from the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, one from Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (all in China), and one from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in the US.

Previous research has shown that there is a link between loneliness and some mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety and insomnia. And some other research has suggested that it goes even further, leading to non-mental health problems such as high blood pressure, digestive problems and even premature death.

In this new study, the research team found evidence that suggests some of the illnesses associated with loneliness are more likely to be caused by something else.

Investigating the possibility of loneliness as a cause of non-mental health problems, the researchers looked at several biomedical databases containing information on millions of patients from the US, China and the UK. They found that patients who reported feeling lonely had a higher risk of developing 30 of the 56 pre-selected conditions.

The researchers then performed statistical analyses on 26 of the 30 conditions, only on those patients for whom genetic data was available. They found that many diseases that were thought to be caused by or related to loneliness were actually caused by other causes. The team found that most of them were not caused by loneliness, but in association with it.

The team concluded that loneliness appears to cause, or exacerbate, a number of mental illnesses, and may also play a role in some other issues, such as the development of inflammation or changes in hormone levels, which can lead to a variety of problems.

He suggested that more research needed to be done to identify which illnesses were truly related to loneliness or social isolation, and which were simply incidental.

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