This reminds me of an article I read last week about Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger (I haven't read much into his work myself but his TED talk has a lot of views). Apparently he's done a longitudinal study of people and found that as they get into their 80s, the biggest predictor of health is the strength of their relationships.
When I read things like this, the impression that I get is that they are saying social connections directly influence health, whereas I think it's probably more of what you are saying (they probably exercise more because they are playing pickle ball with friends or what have you, they are probably wealthier because they are important in their community). They say in the article, "Some participants went on to become successful businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and others ended up as schizophrenics or alcoholics, but not on inevitable tracks." So obviously the schizophrenics and alcoholics are going to have fewer friends. But I guess relationships are a good predictor overall just because they touch/have intersections with so many other aspects of our health (exercise, lifestyle, wealth, etc.)
But one causal link I guess could partially have to do with cortisol/stress levels/inflammation and all that. If you have lots of great friends around you that lower your stress levels maybe that helps with your overall health a bit. I could also see it helping lower levels of cognitive decline, if you are having to keep up conversations and remember loads of different people. And obviously I can see relationship satisfaction as playing an important role in mental health. So really the question you are asking here, at the heart of it, is does mental health impact physical health?
I can see why Age UK has a campaign on loneliness. For many old people living alone and with no family nearby social interaction comes from shopping, visiting the bank, hairdresser, etc. Someone to talk to. They are less likely to be digitally savvy and comfortable with online relationships (some are, I know). Hence bank closures, self service tills, robots answering telephones etc mean that they don’t actually talk to anyone, sometimes for several days. So there is a strong case for increased loneliness which we all agree is a bad thing in its own right even if it doesn’t cause cancer.
My conspiracy theory is that left-leaning institutions like health departments, universities, and the nonprofit sector are focused on this because they are noticing the negative effects of liberal policies on the quality of social relationships and are trying to deflect from their role in the very well-documented decrease in social cohesion by rebranding it as “loneliness.”
I would say the things that have made me feel generally socially dissatisfied in my community over the past few years have been increasing crime, the prevalence of social shunning for minor social offenses, antinatalism and general pessimism, overly broad and unscientific COVID lockdown protocols, and a single minded focus on the absolute most divisive strands of identity politics in all aspects of communal life. It’s very interesting that the more people tried to bring up the above issues and their negative effects on daily quality of life, suddenly we started hearing about the “loneliness epidemic” everywhere. Apparently we aren’t frustrated by a lack of functioning institutions that underlay all aspects of social wellbeing—we’re just lonely!
Odds ratios aren't the same as risk ratios; an odds ratio of 1.5 doesn't mean "1.5 times as likely to die". See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4640017. The 2010 meta-analysis completely screws up this distinction, which does not leave me optimistic about its quality...
You should do an episode of the mental health epidemic. This is based on a lot of shoddy retrospective correlational research where the criteria fir what counts as a mental health problem is very low.
Couple things: First, there is some causal evidence for effects of loneliness on health (including cancer). For example, there’s a literature on how social connection impacts immune function and wound healing. A lot of this is experimental in other animals. But even if you’re predicting wound healing in humans, the injury can’t have caused their pre-injury loneliness. And I think there’s even been some (pre-rep crisis) experiments where they do cruel things to college students like tell them they’ll age alone, then monitor their wound healing, cortisol, inflammatory markers, etc. (I couldn’t find one of these for you though; it’d be a p-hacked mess anyway.)
Second, did you run across much related to depression and loneliness? It surprised me that you didn’t mention that. For all our sloppiness measuring depression, that's a strong link. There's not much non-lonely depression out there; there’s a vicious reciprocal causality thing going on. Anyway I don’t think there’s much debate that untreated depression is associated with non-suicide mortality increases. And I assume there are similar causal processes at play (e.g., depression —> immune impairment —> cancer).
This reminds me of an article I read last week about Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger (I haven't read much into his work myself but his TED talk has a lot of views). Apparently he's done a longitudinal study of people and found that as they get into their 80s, the biggest predictor of health is the strength of their relationships.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/
When I read things like this, the impression that I get is that they are saying social connections directly influence health, whereas I think it's probably more of what you are saying (they probably exercise more because they are playing pickle ball with friends or what have you, they are probably wealthier because they are important in their community). They say in the article, "Some participants went on to become successful businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and others ended up as schizophrenics or alcoholics, but not on inevitable tracks." So obviously the schizophrenics and alcoholics are going to have fewer friends. But I guess relationships are a good predictor overall just because they touch/have intersections with so many other aspects of our health (exercise, lifestyle, wealth, etc.)
But one causal link I guess could partially have to do with cortisol/stress levels/inflammation and all that. If you have lots of great friends around you that lower your stress levels maybe that helps with your overall health a bit. I could also see it helping lower levels of cognitive decline, if you are having to keep up conversations and remember loads of different people. And obviously I can see relationship satisfaction as playing an important role in mental health. So really the question you are asking here, at the heart of it, is does mental health impact physical health?
Whenever epidemic is used metaphorically, I feel it's also used hyperbolically.
I have no evidence for this, but I believe there is a hyperbole epidemic.
I can see why Age UK has a campaign on loneliness. For many old people living alone and with no family nearby social interaction comes from shopping, visiting the bank, hairdresser, etc. Someone to talk to. They are less likely to be digitally savvy and comfortable with online relationships (some are, I know). Hence bank closures, self service tills, robots answering telephones etc mean that they don’t actually talk to anyone, sometimes for several days. So there is a strong case for increased loneliness which we all agree is a bad thing in its own right even if it doesn’t cause cancer.
Thanks for another great episode.
As you mentioned video games, I have to admit I would love to hear an episode on the subject so I can play guilt-free (hopefully :D )
My conspiracy theory is that left-leaning institutions like health departments, universities, and the nonprofit sector are focused on this because they are noticing the negative effects of liberal policies on the quality of social relationships and are trying to deflect from their role in the very well-documented decrease in social cohesion by rebranding it as “loneliness.”
I would say the things that have made me feel generally socially dissatisfied in my community over the past few years have been increasing crime, the prevalence of social shunning for minor social offenses, antinatalism and general pessimism, overly broad and unscientific COVID lockdown protocols, and a single minded focus on the absolute most divisive strands of identity politics in all aspects of communal life. It’s very interesting that the more people tried to bring up the above issues and their negative effects on daily quality of life, suddenly we started hearing about the “loneliness epidemic” everywhere. Apparently we aren’t frustrated by a lack of functioning institutions that underlay all aspects of social wellbeing—we’re just lonely!
Odds ratios aren't the same as risk ratios; an odds ratio of 1.5 doesn't mean "1.5 times as likely to die". See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4640017. The 2010 meta-analysis completely screws up this distinction, which does not leave me optimistic about its quality...
You should do an episode of the mental health epidemic. This is based on a lot of shoddy retrospective correlational research where the criteria fir what counts as a mental health problem is very low.
Couple things: First, there is some causal evidence for effects of loneliness on health (including cancer). For example, there’s a literature on how social connection impacts immune function and wound healing. A lot of this is experimental in other animals. But even if you’re predicting wound healing in humans, the injury can’t have caused their pre-injury loneliness. And I think there’s even been some (pre-rep crisis) experiments where they do cruel things to college students like tell them they’ll age alone, then monitor their wound healing, cortisol, inflammatory markers, etc. (I couldn’t find one of these for you though; it’d be a p-hacked mess anyway.)
Second, did you run across much related to depression and loneliness? It surprised me that you didn’t mention that. For all our sloppiness measuring depression, that's a strong link. There's not much non-lonely depression out there; there’s a vicious reciprocal causality thing going on. Anyway I don’t think there’s much debate that untreated depression is associated with non-suicide mortality increases. And I assume there are similar causal processes at play (e.g., depression —> immune impairment —> cancer).
See here's something along these lines. They had wounded these poor kids to see whether the lonely ones healed slower. Looks like they tried to partial out depression from loneliness too. So the causality is not as elusive as you make it sound in this episode. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=827a782f64a8e5968c1faf1e0270e7f4aec6768d