Observational and genetic evidence disagree on the association between loneliness and risk of multiple diseases

Yannis Yan Liang, Mingqing Zhou, Yu He, Weijie Zhang, Qiqi Wu, Tong Luo, Jun Zhang, Fujun Jia, Lu Qi (), Sizhi Ai () and Jihui Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Yannis Yan Liang: Guangzhou Medical University
Mingqing Zhou: Guangzhou Medical University
Yu He: Guangzhou Medical University
Weijie Zhang: Guangzhou Medical University
Qiqi Wu: Guangzhou Medical University
Tong Luo: Guangzhou Medical University
Jun Zhang: The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University
Fujun Jia: Southern Medical University
Lu Qi: Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Sizhi Ai: Guangzhou Medical University
Jihui Zhang: Guangzhou Medical University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2024, vol. 8, issue 11, 2209-2221

Abstract: Abstract Loneliness—the subjective experience of social disconnection—is now widely regarded as a health risk factor. However, whether the associations between loneliness and multiple diseases are consistent with causal effects remains largely unexplored. Here we combined behavioural, genetic and hospitalization data from the UK Biobank to examine the associations of loneliness with a wide range of non-overlapping diseases. During a median 12.2-year follow-up, loneliness was associated with greater risks in 13 of 14 disease categories and 30 of 56 individual diseases considered. Of the 30 diseases significantly associated with loneliness, 26 had genetic data available for Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses. After Benjamini‒Hochberg correction and multiple sensitivity analyses within the MR framework, non-causal associations were identified between genetic liability to loneliness and 20 out of the 26 specific diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes mellitus, obesity, chronic liver diseases, chronic kidney disease, most neurological diseases and the other common diseases. Genetic liability to loneliness was only potentially causally associated with the remaining six diseases. Socioeconomic factors, health behaviours, baseline depressive symptoms and comorbidities largely explained the associations between loneliness and diseases. Overall, our study revealed a dissociation between observational and genetic evidence regarding the associations of loneliness with multiple diseases. These findings suggest that loneliness may serve as a potential surrogate marker rather than a causal risk factor for most diseases tested here.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01970-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:8:y:2024:i:11:d:10.1038_s41562-024-01970-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01970-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().