Being a loner reduces immunity and heart health 528

Being a loner reduces immunity and heart health

Low levels of social connectedness can adversely affect the body - lowering immune response and affecting heart health - highlight two new studies.

One study demonstrates that first-year college students who mixed with fewer people or felt lonely had a lower immune response to influenza vaccination than their more gregarious or socially contented classmates.

A second study suggests that men who are socially isolated have elevated levels of a blood marker for inflammation, which has a role in atherosclerosis. It was known that isolation has detrimental effects on heart health, but the study gives clues as to how this is mediated, says Sarah Pressman, a health psychologist a Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US.

Pressman and colleagues found small social networks and loneliness lowered the antibody response of students to the flu jab. But surprisingly, the effects were independent of one another. “Loneliness is the perception of being alone,” she explains, whereas social networks can be counted objectively as the number of people with whom a person has contact.

“You can have very few friends but still not feel lonely. Alternatively, you can have many friends yet feel lonely,” says Pressman.

The researchers gave questionnaires to 83 university students to find out how many people they talked to over a fortnight. They also gave them palm computers to record any feelings of loneliness and measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Students who felt the loneliest had a 16% poorer immune antibody response to one strain contained in the flu vaccine - the A/Caledonia component - than those at the other end of the scale.

And students with the smallest social networks - mixing with between four to 12 people in a two-week period - had an 11% poorer response to the same component than those with the social networks of over 20 people.

However, unlike previous research, this study did not find a correlation between cortisol levels and the poorer immune response linked to social isolation. Cortisol levels were higher in lonelier students, but this did not relate to antibody levels months after immunization. Pressman suggests this might be explained by sampling problems.

Other possible factors were that lonely students were more stressed and had a poorer quality of sleep compared with their classmates. The effects of social network size are “more of a mystery” she notes. But people with fewer social contacts may have fewer people to influence healthy behaviors.

The second study of over 3000 men, presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Washington, showed that those who had the lowest levels of social involvement - being unmarried or having few people to confide in, for example - had the highest levels of an inflammatory marker called interleukin-6.

Pressman acknowledges that there is no easy or obvious way to remedy a person’s feelings of loneliness. But she notes that simply keeping in touch with social contacts like family and friends would have a protective effect.

Journal reference: Health Psychology (DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.24.3.000
02 May 2005
Shaoni Bhattacharya

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