The growing problem of loneliness
By John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo. The Lancet, 2018
677 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centred, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. Imagine too that in industrialised countries around a third of people are affected by this condition, with one person in 12 affected severely, and that these proportions are increasing. Income, education, sex, and ethnicity are not protective, and the condition is contagious. The effects of the condition are not attributable to some peculiarity of the character of a subset of individuals, they are a result of the condition affecting ordinary people. Such a condition exists— loneliness. 1–3 Loneliness is often stigmatised, trivialised, or ignored, but—with the rapidly growing number of older adults in industrialised countries, the increased likelihood of premature mortality, and the deleterious effects of loneliness that have been identified in animal models and human longitudinal investigations—loneliness is emerging as a public health problem. 4 Physicians are encountering this condition, but most do not have the information needed to deal effectively with loneliness in their patients.
Subfields: Health, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0227c3fcf6f097816370f20780148c9a1821aa0e
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Citations in the corpus
- The Trajectory of Loneliness in Response to COVID-19 (2020, background): “…2020; Miller, 2020).1 Even before the coronavirus crisis, loneliness was a public health issue because it is widespread and associated with increased risk of morbidity and mortality (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018; Holt-Lunstad, 2017; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine, 2020).”
- The Neurobiology of Social Distance (2020, neutral): “In 2019, the World Health Organization declared that loneliness is a major health concern worldwide [4].”
- User Experiences of Social Support From Companion Chatbots in Everyday Contexts: Thematic Analysis (2020, background): “This is important because loneliness is currently a widespread global health issue [35] and can have serious negative effects on health [36-39].”