Health News

Lonely? You've Got Lots of Company

March 9, 2006 -- Loneliness is all about feeling isolated, but it's actually quite common, a new study shows.

The study appears in the Journal of Clinical Nursing. It's based on a survey of more than 1,200 adults in Australia who were aged 18 and older.

Among the findings:

• Almost a third of participants (35%) reported being lonely.
• Men were more likely than women to report being lonely.
• People who said they had "strong religious beliefs" were less likely to report being lonely.
• People with higher incomes reported less loneliness.

The researchers included William Lauder, PhD, RMN. He's a professor at the nursing and midwifery school at Australia's University of Dundee.

Loneliness: What Counts?

Does age make a difference in loneliness? Lauder's survey didn't prove that.

The survey showed that loneliness was lowest for 18- to 19-year-olds and highest for people in their 40s, with the elderly falling somewhere in between. But those results could have been due to chance, so don't count on the 40s being a particularly lonely decade.

In addition, retirees reported less loneliness than unemployed people.

Length of time living in the area didn't matter. Neither did the number of a person's social ties.

"Loneliness has less to do with the quantity of social relationships than with the quality" of those relationships, the researchers write.

Loneliness and Health

Loneliness has been linked to depression, heart disease, and other health problems, note Lauder and colleagues.

But their survey didn't cover health problems. The researchers also don't know which comes first -- loneliness or those other conditions -- or how loneliness might hamper health.

Lauder's survey amounts to a one-time snapshot of loneliness. It doesn't show if participants were just having a bad day when they took the 30-minute telephone survey or if they'd felt lonely for a long time.

Even so, there's no need to let loneliness run (or ruin) your life. Forging new social ties or deepening existing relationships could prove rewarding at any stage of life.