Loneliness May Be a Bigger Public Health Threat Than Smoking or Obesity

Governments are just starting to confront the issue.

Since stepping down as surgeon general in April of last year, Vivek Murthy has turned his attention to what he considers to be America’s fastest-growing public health crisis. No, it isn’t cardiovascular diseases or obesity or smoking or even the nation’s system of health-care delivery. Murthy is taking on a more unlikely cause: loneliness.

“During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness,” Murthy wrote in theHarvard Business Review in 2017. “The elderly man who came to our hospital every few weeks seeking relief from chronic pain was also looking for human connection: He was lonely. The middle-aged woman battling advanced HIV who had no one to call to inform that she was sick: She was lonely too. I found that loneliness was often in the background of clinical illness, contributing to disease and making it harder for patients to cope and heal.” Loneliness, he wrote, is associated “with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression and anxiety.”

More