She is a 62-year-old white woman. Let’s call her Maria. She lives in the United States and has a night job, which makes socializing a little difficult. Yesterday she went to bed at four in the morning and today she woke up at nine. She could continue sleeping, but she doesn’t want to, or maybe she has stayed up late. She turns on the TV, they are showing a religious program. She thinks it’s fine, María watches TV a lot. Something always happens there. In her daily life, no. She has no children or close friends. She’s not especially sociable, so she fills her days with shows, realities, newscasts and movies. With other people’s lives. When the religious broadcast ends, María does something zapping and she gets stuck watching another program. And other. A movie. Without knowing how, it’s 5:45 p.m., so she makes herself some dinner. Afterwards she cleans the house, she rests a little and stays transfixed. Oh, she’s late. She hastily showers and gets ready. It’s 10:45 at night and she has to leave for work.
This happened on a specific day in his life, but it could be yesterday, it could be any day. That’s his routine. Maria has reasonably good self-rated health, but she is not happy. If you asked her, she would tell you that her happiness level is a two out of ten. That’s what she answered American Time Use Survey a macro survey on the use of time that the US Government has been conducting since 2003. In these 20 years, they have confirmed that María’s case is not unique. In fact, loneliness has become a much more common experience in recent decades, and has been enhanced by the pandemic. And this is not only a social problem, but also a health problem. Even though María thinks that her health is good, she is 39% more likely to die than a person of the same age, sex and condition, but with more social connections.
This is what a scientific study assures published today in the magazine BMC Medicine. The idea is not new; Different studies have pointed out this evidence in recent years, but few have done so with the forcefulness and concreteness of this. Instead of talking about loneliness in general, he has differentiated between objective and subjective loneliness; the one that comes from an isolation of epidermal relationships and those that are more intense, those that we maintain with close friends and family. He has taken into account the qualitative, but also the quantitative. And he has come to the conclusion that in this life, the most important thing is to see family and close friends. And one visit a month is enough.
“The truth is that it was not what we expected to find,” he confessed. cardiologist Jason Gill, one of the authors of the study, during his presentation, which was held a few days ago by videoconference. “But it seems clear that there is a threshold effect. Once you start seeing your friends and family monthly, the risk remains fairly stable. It doesn’t matter if it is a monthly visit, weekly, several times a week or every day,” he noted. You have to be sociable, yes, but it is not necessary to be too sociable, at least from a health and strictly instrumental point of view. “Seeing them more frequently doesn’t give you any additional benefit.”
To carry out the study, data from 458,146 adults recruited in the UK Biobank, a huge biomedical database available for scientific trials. Participants were recruited between 2006 and 2010 and had a mean age of 56.5 years. 13 years later, 33,135 of them had died. The authors compared the deaths with the answers they had given to a series of questions about loneliness, harmonizing factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic situation and previous illnesses. They then came to a devastating conclusion: loneliness kills.
“There are different types of loneliness and different types of isolation,” explains the University of Glasgow professor, Harmish Foster, who also participated in the study. On this occasion they analyzed several. They saw that subjective loneliness is less lethal than (objective) social isolation, but that, combined, they are fatal. Among the factors that determine how isolated a person may feel are whether or not they participate in group activities, living alone or with someone, and receiving visits from friends and family. “Each of these three factors was associated with a higher risk of death, but in particular, people who reported never receiving visitors stood out.”
Asked about the reasons that may explain this protective effect of loved ones, researchers limit themselves to theorizing. “Our study doesn’t answer this directly, but it may be that friends and family offer a particular level of support to people and help them access health services.” There is also a link with behavior, socially isolated people have more unhealthy behaviors such as smoking or heavy alcohol consumption. They eliminate or blur healthy habits like exercising, keeping a schedule, and sleeping more than seven hours a day. María’s case, with inconsistent schedules and a sedentary routine, could perfectly exemplify this effect.
“I find it interesting that a distinction is made between different types of loneliness, differentiating between the structural and the functional,” explains Bryan Strange, director of The Laboratory for Clinical Neuroscience, at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. This structural solitude is where the benefits of sporadic visits are seen. “Seeing the results of the study, I think it is highly advisable, if you know someone who lives alone, to pay them a visit.” Strange has done a lot of work studying the superagers or super elderly, people who, at 80 years old, maintain a memory similar to people thirty years younger. “In this case we also saw that it stood out that these people had many social relationships, so it seems that there is a general benefit at a cognitive level.”
Andrés Rueda, social gerontologist and director of ASCAD agrees with this idea and sentence: “They go hand in hand, loneliness is a bad companion of physiology, the state of mind influences the course of diseases. Consequently, the worse the state of mind, the worse the state of the pathologies.” Rueda has been working in nursing homes for 40 years and believes that visits from friends and family help, but that important connections can also be created with other inmates. In any case, he says, once you reach a certain age, it is much better to live in a residence than in solitude.
Cintia Gracia, social worker and director of the Albertia el Moreral residence, also highlights the role of stronger ties between its residents. “The family makes it much easier to go out of the center or home, your family comes, takes you out, tells you about their life. In some way it is encouraging you to stay active, to have a reason to be alert, excited.”
The study of BMC Medicine has focused on older adults who, initially, were between 40 and 70 years old. “We don’t have data on younger people,” laments Dr. Foster. “But one of the ideas of this type of research, especially if it’s about mortality, is that it tends to happen to everyone.” Visiting grandma once a month can be a good protective measure, a nice way to extend her life expectancy. But it is not an altruistic act, this protective effect could be bidirectional. “We are social animals,” adds Dr. Rueda. “And we are regardless of our age.”
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