Loneliness causes ill-health through proteins

Loneliness (Credit: @chantaldgarcia via Twenty20)

From the Guardian

Loneliness has long been associated with ill health but researchers say they have fresh insights into the link between the two.

While poor health can result in people becoming isolated and lonely, studies have also suggested loneliness can itself lead to poorer health.

Now researchers say they have unpicked a mechanism for the latter relationship, finding loneliness can affect the levels of a handful of proteins associated with various diseases and even death.

Prof Barbara Sahakian, a co-author of the study at the University of Cambridge, said the World Health Organization had declared social isolation and loneliness a major problem in the world. “I think the message is that we’ve got to start to get people to realise that it’s part of a health thing, both for their mental health and their wellbeing but also for their physical health, that they have to remain connected with other people,” she said.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they used data from more than 42,000 participants in the UK Biobank project to explore whether the 9.3% who reported social isolation and 6.4% who reported loneliness had different levels of proteins in their blood compared with those who did not.

After taking into account factors including age, sex, education level, smoking and alcohol consumption, the team found 175 proteins associated with social isolation and 26 proteins associated with self-reported loneliness, many of which overlapped. Most of the proteins were found at higher levels in people who had reported social isolation or loneliness, and are involved in inflammation, antiviral responses and the immune system.

The researchers then studied data that tracked the health of participants over an average 14-year period. “We found around 90% of these proteins are linked to the risk of mortality,” said Dr Chun Shen, the first author of the research, from Fudan University in China. In addition, about 50% of the proteins were linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke.

The researchers then used an approach known as Mendelian randomisation to look at whether people with genetic variants associated with loneliness or social isolation had a greater chance of having higher levels of the proteins of interest. They also looked at whether people with genetic variants that meant they had higher levels of these proteins were more likely to be socially isolated or lonely.

Assuming these variants are spread randomly throughout the population, the approach can shed light on whether levels of the proteins are a driver, or an effect, of social isolation or loneliness.

The researchers found none of the proteins appeared to cause social isolation or loneliness. However, loneliness influenced the levels of five proteins. “We found all these five proteins are related to numerous inflammation and metabolic markers,” Shen said.

Among other findings, these five proteins partly explained the association between loneliness and cardiovascular disease, stroke, and mortality, with four of the five associated with the volume of brain regions involved in emotional and social processes and the brain’s perception of the body’s state.

Shen said while the effects were not large, they were significant, noting that levels of one of the proteins, known as ADM, could explain, on average, about 7.5% of the association between loneliness and the risk of four diseases and mortality.

Prof Marko Elovainio, of the University of Helsinki, who was not involved in the work, said the study strongly supported previous research indicating that loneliness and – to some extent – social isolation were linked to numerous physical health problems, possibly as a result of systemic inflammatory processes induced by stress.

“A significant contribution of this study is that it now elucidates the biological mechanism – proteins – that may be responsible for the observed connections,” he said.

However, Elovainio suggested stress-related health behaviours, such as heavy alcohol consumption and low physical activity, might be an even more significant factor contributing to the health impacts of loneliness, and might also underlie some of the protein level changes flagged in the study.

“How society should … reduce the health risks related to loneliness is the interesting question, and if we want to focus on the mechanisms, the behaviour is probably [an] easier target than proteins,” he said.

Here's the thing:  conventional economics, and capitalism, price everything.   And in their models, friendship, affection, love, caring, fun, joy and companionship have no value.  Their models don't "solve" for high levels of these intangible things which make life worthwhile.  

Neo-liberalism has comprehensively failed. Time for a change in what we value and how we treat each other.

[See also:  How Chronic Loneliness Can Trigger Health Problems;  Shit-life Syndrome; and Loneliness]

People try to help one another

Two of the axioms that underlie much economic theory are that people are selfish and that they always want more—they are greedy.  Of course, some people are selfish and greedy.  But we often aren't.  We work for and donate to charities, for example.  We appear to have inbuilt ethical biases towards fairness, as another example.  If groups of two people are offered money, with one "owning" the money, while the other decides the split between the two of them, splits perceived as unfair are rejected even when it means that neither receives any money.  Needless to say, people may sometimes be greedy, selfish and unfair.  But to assume that they always are, which is what economics does, is false.  It does raise questions about how much of economics is valid.  Indeed, you could argue that economic theory is constructed to provide justification for capitalism, instead of being independent and intrinsically valid.

This interesting article reported by ZME Science again shows how people co-operate and help each other.

Different motivators to do good don’t drown each other out, the team reports, adding that people generally want to help those around them.

The findings help cement our understanding of reciprocity and prosocial behavior in the complex societal contexts of today. It’s also a hopeful reminder in these strange and trying times that deep down, we all want to make life better for everyone.

We all have four broad categories of motivators for which to help those around us: doing a kindness in return for someone who helped us out, doing something nice for someone we’ve seen helping a third person out, doing good as a response to people in our social circles who might be impressed with or reward that behavior, and as a way to “pay it forward” — to help someone if somebody else has done something nice for us.

The team explains that these four motivators could be at odds with one another. For example, we could prioritize rewarding someone who helped us out before to the detriment of others who might need assistance more than that person. The interplay between these four motivators during our social interactions has not been studied, however.

But there are grounds for hope. The authors report that in their experiment, people overwhelmingly chose to be generous to others, and even if they were complete strangers, even in situations where their motivators could create conflicts of interests.

“We wanted to do an exhaustive study to see what the effects of those motivations would be when combined — because they are combined in the real world, where people are making choices about how generous or kind to be with one another,” said David Melamed, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

The study included 700 participants and was designed to put them in a variety of situations where different motivators might compete. Participants took part in online interactions where they had to decide how much of a 10-point endowment they wanted to give other people. They were informed that these points would have a monetary value at the end of the study. This way, giving points away had a cost for the participants.

“[Prosocial behavior] means doing something for someone else at a cost to yourself,” Melamed said. “So one example would be paying for the person behind you’s order at the coffee shop. Or right now, wearing your mask in public. It’s a cost to you; it’s uncomfortable. But you contribute to the public good by wearing it and not spreading the virus.”

“In the real world, the conditions under which people are nice to each other are not isolated — people are embedded in their networks, and they’re going about their daily lives and coming into contact with things that will affect their decisions.”

Melamed says he expected to see the different motivators ‘crowd’ one another out. For example, a person focusing on giving back help they received might be less inclined towards the other motivators.

However, they found that “while [there is] some minor variation in how a given form of reciprocity might affect other forms,” people overwhelmingly showed an inclination towards helping others in all scenarios (each of which emphasized one type or combination of reciprocity types).

Melamed notes that from an evolutionary perspective, such behavior is very curious, as it decreases an individual’s fitness to boost that of others. [This is the old 'social Darwinism' theory that the Right so loves: of course, it is the survival of the group or tribe which matters, which is why these co-operative behaviours are in-built. Before 'civilisation', individual survival outside a group was much more difficult than survival within a group. The group/tribe matters.] Having it so deeply ingrained in our nature then shows the importance social relations played during our evolution. It also shows the extent to which they helped shape our cultures and civilizations.