Lonely People Living Alone Tend to Die Sooner

Living alone may have yet another unfavorable effect on a persons health.

The findings of a new study suggest that people suffering from heart disease who live alone have a higher tendency to die earlier compared to those who share their home with others.

Even though it is still not clear why there is a difference, access to regular medicine might play a role, said Dr. Deepak Bhatt, the lead researcher of the study.

Bhatt said that patients who live without companions may find it more difficult to get refills of their medications and take them on a regular basis. Furthermore, they have nobody at home who can “call the doctor’s office or emergency room if they are not looking well,” Bhatt added.

Previous research has come up with varied conclusions; however, studies have associated social interaction with all kinds of health conditions from heart attacks to undermined immune systems.

The association between living alone and dying

For the study, Bhatt, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and his fellow researchers specifically looked at people with diagnosed heart disease or have a very high risk of developing the condition. The study included over 44,000 people, all of whom were at least 45 years of age and coming from different countries all over the world.

Over the course of the study which ran for four years, 7.7 percent of participants below 65 years old who lived alone died, against merely 5.7 percent of the people who shared their homes with others, the researchers said.

For participants age 66 to 80, the difference was not as big, but still it continued to be statistically reliable even after taking into account other factors such as age, sex, employment, ethnicity and country of origin. Nevertheless, the study found no association between the living situation of participants older than 80 and incidence of deaths.

Stress, loneliness and heart disease

In their report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the researchers wrote they believe that in people below 80 years of age, living without companions could indicate psychological and social problems such as work-related stress or loneliness. On the other hand, very old people who do not live with others may have better health and more independence compared to those who do.

No matter what the explanation is, cardiologists should regularly ask their patients if they live on their own, said Bhatt.

If you get an affirmative answer, that might be a signal and they should see to it that the patients have a way to have their medications refilled on a regular basis, he added.

In the meantime, patients living alone should try to consider before disregarding any changes that might be indicative of health problems.

Bhatt said a lot of times people simply get used to their circumstances. “Perhaps just lower your threshold a little bit and realize it’s better to call (the doctor) than not to call,” he said.

He admitted, however, that it might not be the complete story.

According to Bhatt, other mechanisms whereby living alone could raise the risk of cardiac disease have something to do with potential social isolation and loneliness, “and these are more challenging to fix,” he added.

In fact, the findings of another study published along with that of Bhatt and his colleagues, suggest that older adults who suffered from loneliness found it more difficult to carry out basic tasks of everyday life and died sooner compared to those who did not feel alone.