Are you lonely tonight?
Are you sleepless in Seattle, friendless in Frisco or bereft in Baltimore?
If so, your health could be in danger, medical research suggests, and not just your mental health. Evidence has been mounting that the lack of social support -- what most people would probably feel as loneliness -- is as bad for your heart as physical inactivity, smoking and obesity.
In a study at Duke University, for example, a sobering 50 percent of heart-disease patients who had neither spouse nor confidant were dead within five years of their evaluation at Duke. But only 17 percent or 18 percent of married or befriended peers had died within the same time frame.
From this and other research, it's clear that the lack of social support is associated with "earlier onset and worse outcome of heart disease," says Dr. Redford Williams, director of the Duke research.
This represents a shift in medical thinking. Song writers have been telling us since the guitar was invented that achy-breaky hearts lead to untimely ends, but physicians are a more literal-minded crew and would rather talk about angina than heartache. Trained in the hard sciences, for a long time they "viewed with skepticism" a relationship between psychosocial factors and disease, Williams says.
But the stack of studies demonstrating a relationship has mounted so high that even "hard-nosed medical types are becoming more accepting," he says, "though there'll always be some die-hards who resist."
And while the die-hards keep resisting, the accepters have moved on. Now that they don't have to prove a relationship between psychosocial factors and heart disease, they are beginning to look for how the relationship does its damage, and what they can do about it.
Within the last few years, researchers have turned their focus to mechanisms and interventions, says Lisa Berkman, chair and professor of the department of health and social behavior and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Mechanisms are the biological "how" by which the psychosocial facts of isolation and loneliness are translated into the physical fact of heart disease.
Stress hormones, for example, have been implicated in the development of heart disease, so researchers looked to see if social support has an effect on the levels of those hormones. Sure enough, greater social support was found to be associated with lower -- and safer -- levels of those hormones in a study headed by Teresa Seeman, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the UCLA School of Medicine.
