A new study indicates that loneliness can be twice as deadly as obesity and be just as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Researchers from Britain’s International Longevity Centre and Independent Age Organization conducted the six-year study on more than 2,000 people over 50 years of age.
Subjects in the study who said they were lonely were found to have a 14 percent higher risk of dying than those who did not face social isolation. Poverty, meanwhile, hikes the risk of an early death by 19 percent.
The study also found that the loneliest participants were nearly twice as likely to die during the research period than the least lonely.
Results indicated a sharply rising number of men living alone in the U.K. alone, with the number predicted to reach 1.5 million by 2030 – and also noted a high incidence of loneliness particularly among elderly men.
Older men tend to be more socially isolated than their female counterparts, (1 in 3, compared to 1 in 5), and were also found to have less contact with their children, family and friends, the results showed.
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