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(2014·淮安调研)You say you want to be alone? Think again. Researchers have found that older people with fewer human contacts are more likely to die — even if they're happy in their isolation (孤立状态) — than people with richer social lives. The study adds to the debate over whether loneliness, social isolation, or some combination of the two leads to higher death rate.
Social isolation is an objective condition in which people have little communication with others. Loneliness, on the other hand, is an emotional state felt by people who are dissatisfied with their social connections.
To find out the effects of being alone versus (比对) just feeling lonely, Steptoe of University College London and his colleagues examined data from 6,500 Britons aged 50 and up who had filled out questionnaires evaluating their levels of loneliness.
The most socially isolated subjects had a 26% greater risk of dying, even when sex, age, and other factors linked to survival were taken into account, the researchers report online today. They then made changes about their model to determine whether the connection to death was due to the fact that isolated people are often lonely. It wasn't.
The researchers then explored the connection between loneliness itself and death. Intense loneliness also appeared to raise the risk of death by 26% — until the team took into account a host of other factors linked to survival, including wealth, education, and the presence of health problems. Once their impact had been explained, the scientists discovered that loneliness on its own didn't make people more vulnerable (脆弱的) to death.
The researchers suspect that older people who have few social ties may not be getting the care they need. No one is urging them to eat right or take their medicine, and in a crisis no one is there to help.
Other researchers praise the new work as rigorous (严密的) and wellcontrolled. But they say it's far from clear that social isolation, not loneliness, is always the real cause of increased death rate.
Other studies, including an analysis of older Americans led by John Cacioppo, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois, have shown a link between loneliness and a higher death rate. Cacioppo suspects that the disagreement between his study and the new research could lie with cultural differences between Steptoe's British subjects and Americans, and that Britons and Americans may define friends differently, too.
Health psychologist Bert Uchino of the University of Utah praises the new study, but he says that researchers are still far from understanding how those two factors affect one another and other healthrelated behaviors.
