Greater feelings of loneliness and social isolation were associated with a higher risk of mortality among cancer survivors, according to a retrospective longitudinal study. Over the study period of 10 years, cancer survivors with higher loneliness scores on the UCLA Loneliness Scale had higher mortality risk compared with those who had low/no loneliness scores, following a dose-response association:
- Mild loneliness: adjusted HR 1.19 (95% CI 0.86-1.63)
- Moderate loneliness: aHR 1.41 (95% CI 1.01-1.96)
- Severe loneliness: aHR 1.67 (95% CI 1.25-2.23, P=0.004)
By : Mike Bassett
Source: MedPageToday
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Critics:
Loneliness has long been viewed as a universal condition which, at least to a moderate extent, is felt by everyone. From this perspective, some degree of loneliness is inevitable as the limitations of human life mean it is impossible for anyone to continually satisfy their inherent need for connection. Professors including Michele A. Carter and Ben Lazare Mijuskovic have written books and essays tracking the existential perspective and the many writers who have talked about it throughout history.
Thomas Wolfe’s 1930s essay God’s Lonely Man is frequently discussed in this regard; Wolfe makes the case that everyone imagines they are lonely in a special way unique to themselves, whereas really every single person sometimes experiences loneliness. While agreeing that loneliness alleviation can be a good thing, those who take the existential view tend to doubt such efforts can ever be fully successful, seeing some level of loneliness as both unavoidable and even beneficial, as it can help people appreciate the joy of living.
Culture is discussed as a cause of loneliness in two senses. Migrants can experience loneliness due to missing their home culture. Studies have found this effect can be especially strong for students from countries in Asia with a collectivist culture, when they go to study at universities in more individualist English-speaking countries. Culture is also seen as a cause of loneliness in the sense that Western culture may have been contributing to loneliness, ever since the Enlightenment began to favour individualism over older communal values.
For many people the family of origin did not offer the trust building relationships needed to build a reference that lasts a lifetime and even in memory after the passing of a loved one. This can be due to parenting style, traditions, mental health issues including personality disorders and abusive family environments. Sometimes religious shunning is also present. This impacts the ability of individuals to know themselves, to value themselves and to relate to others or to do so with great difficulty.
All these factors and many others are often overlooked by the standard medical or psychological advice that recommends to go meet friends, family and to socialise. This is not always possible when there is no one available to relate to and an inability to connect without the skills and knowledge on how to proceed. With time a person might become discouraged or develop apathy from numerous trials, failures or rejections brought on by the lack of interpersonal skills.
As the rate of loneliness increases yearly among people of every age group and more so in the elderly, with known detrimental physical and psychological effects, there is a need to find new ways to connect people with each other and especially so at a time when a whole lot of the human attention is focused on electronic devices, it is a challenge. Studies have tended to find a moderate correlation between extensive internet use and loneliness, especially ones that draw on data from the 1990s, before internet use became widespread.
Contradictory results have been found by studies investigating whether the association is simply a result of lonely people being more attracted to the internet or if the internet can actually cause loneliness. The displacement hypothesis holds that some people choose to withdraw from real world social interactions so they can have more time for the internet.
Excessive internet use can directly cause anxiety and depression, conditions which can contribute to loneliness – yet these factors may be offset by the internet’s ability to facilitate interaction, and to empower people. Some studies found that internet use is a cause of loneliness, at least for some types of people. Others have found internet use can have a significant positive effect on reducing loneliness.
The authors of meta studies and reviews from about 2015 and later have tended to argue that there is a bidirectional causal relationship between loneliness and internet use. Excessive use, especially if passive, can increase loneliness. While moderate use, especially by users who engage with others rather than just passively consume content, can increase social connection and reduce loneliness.
Smaller early studies had estimated that loneliness may be between 37–55% hereditable. However, in 2016, the first Genome-wide association study of loneliness found that the heredity of loneliness is much lower, at about 14–27%.This suggests that while genes play a role in determining how much loneliness a person may feel, they are less of a factor than individual experiences and the environment.
Loneliness peaks in adolescence and late adulthood, while being less common in middle adulthood. People making long driving commutes have reported dramatically higher feelings of loneliness (as well as other negative health impacts). Two principal types of loneliness are social and emotional loneliness. This delineation was made in 1973 by Robert S. Weiss, in his seminal work: Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation.
Based on Weiss’s view that “both types of loneliness have to be examined independently, because the satisfaction for the need of emotional loneliness cannot act as a counterbalance for social loneliness, and vice versa”, people working to treat or better understand loneliness have tended to treat these two types of loneliness separately, though this is far from always the case.
Social loneliness is the loneliness people experience because of the lack of a wider social network. They may not feel they are members of a community, or that they have friends or allies whom they can rely on in times of distress. Emotional loneliness results from the lack of deep, nurturing relationships with other people. Weiss tied his concept of emotional loneliness to attachment theory.
People have a need for deep attachments, which can be fulfilled by close friends, though more often by close family members such as parents, and later in life by romantic partners. In 1997, Enrico DiTommaso and Barry Spinner separated emotional loneliness into Romantic and Family loneliness. A 2019 study found that emotional loneliness significantly increased the likelihood of death for older adults living alone (whereas there was no increase in mortality found with social loneliness).
Family loneliness results when individuals feel they lack close ties with family members. A 2010 study of 1,009 students found that only family loneliness was associated with increased frequency of self-harm, not romantic or social loneliness. Romantic loneliness can be experienced by adolescents and adults who lack a close bond with a romantic partner.
Psychologists have asserted that the formation of a committed romantic relationship is a critical development task for young adults but is also one that many are delaying into their late 20s or beyond. People in romantic relationships tend to report less loneliness than single people, provided their relationship provides them with emotional intimacy. People in unstable or emotionally cold romantic partnerships can still feel romantic loneliness.
Loneliness Linked To Lower Odds Of Cancer Survival
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