Study: Loneliness More Than A Feeling, Can Make Humans Physically Sick - Loneliness not only makes humans miserable or dejected. It can also trigger sickness, a new research finds.
According to the Oxford English dictionary, loneliness means “sadness
because one has no friends or company.” But loneliness is more than a
feeling says a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America this week.
Scientists have long known the dangers of loneliness, but the new
PNAS published study is the first to show how loneliness can
trigger physiological responses that can lead to sickness.
A group of researchers has found that feeling lonely can lead
to fight-or-flight stress signaling, meaning, it can affect the
production of white blood cells in human body.
Previous scientific article published by the same group has
identified a link between loneliness and “conserved transcriptional
response to adversity,” or CTRA. It found that lonely and isolated
people had a less effective immune response and had more inflammation
than “non-lonely” people.
For the current study, six researchers examined loneliness in humans,
and also a highly social primate species, the rhesus macaque monkeys.
Human participants in the study were from the Chicago Health, Aging, and
Social Relations Study, a study that began in 2002 with adults aged 50
to 68 years.
Researchers focused their attention on the gene expression in
leukocytes, the cells in the human immune system that are involved in
the body’s protection from viruses and bacteria - and they found
that leukocytes in lonely human participants and rhesus macaques showed
the effects of the CTRA.
Loneliness and Sickness: New Findings
The new research says new pieces of information were found about human’s loneliness and its effect on body and health.
Firstly, the team has found that loneliness predicted future CTRA
gene expression measured a year or more later. It also predicted
loneliness measured a year or more later. In short, the Leukocyte and
loneliness have a reciprocal relationship - and each can help propagate
the other over time. The research team says the results were specific to
feeling of loneliness, and it could not be explained by other factors
such as stress, depression or social support.
Secondly, the group has investigated the cellular processes linking
CTRA gene expression and social experience in rhesus macaques which had
been behaviorally classified as high in perceived social isolation. Like
human loneliness, the primates showed higher CTRA activity. Researchers
also saw higher levels of the “fight-or-flight” stress signaling in
lonely rhesus macaques.
And finally, the team said that the white blood cell-linked CTRA
shift had real consequences for health. In a monkey model of a viral
infection, the impaired antiviral gene expression in lonely monkeys
allowed monkey’s version of HIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus, to
grow faster in both blood and brain.
The study is titled “Myeloid differentiation architecture of
leukocyte transcriptome dynamics in perceived social isolation” and it’s
now available on the PNAS
of USA website. Authors are Steven W. Cole, John P. Capitanio, Katie
Chun, Jesusa M. G. Arevalo, Jeffrey Ma, and John T. Cacioppo. Source: StGist
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