LONELINESS — Hive

Researchers warn that many nations around the world are facing an impending loneliness epidemic.

Is loneliness a silent killer? Things like obesity and smoking are well established and clear contributors to the risk of premature mortality, but according to a new study, the impacts of chronic social isolation may pose a similar threat.

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And loneliness seems to be on the rise. In 2010, the American Association of Retired Persons conducted a so-called Loneliness Study, using the most recent census data to gauge loneliness among the US population. It found more than a quarter of the nation lived alone, more than half the population was unmarried and, compared to the previous census, marriage rates and children per household had both declined.

Brigham Young University's Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her team pored over the data from two meta-analyses. The first of those was built on 148 studies involving more than 300,000 subjects, finding that a greater social connection was linked with a 50 percent reduced risk of early death.

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The other was made up of 70 studies involving more than 3.4 million subjects from North America, Australia, Asia and Europe, and looked at the impact social isolation, loneliness and living alone have on mortality. The team found that these three factors had a significant impact on the risk of premature death, placing it on par with, or even exceeding, other well-known risk factors like obesity.

According to the researchers, pumping resources into social skills training in schools and encouraging doctors to take social connectedness into account as part of regular medical screening would be a good step forward. They also suggest folks should prepare for retirement in a social sense as well as a financial sense, and that places like recreation centers and community gardens should be designed to include social spaces for sharing and interaction.