Loneliness is a personal experience connected with a lack of social contacts in conjunction with numerous internal elements related to personality. Loneliness is becoming to be seen as a risk factor for numerous main unfavorable health effects more and more.
Chronic stress and hypervigilance resulting from social isolation and loneliness can cause sleep quality to be poor, physiological changes in cardiovascular health, compromised immunological function, neuroendocrine impacts, and raised cortisol levels.
Apart from physically poor health, loneliness is linked to cognitive decline, depression, and early death.
Definitions of loneliness
Although loneliness combined with social isolation has been linked to poor health, since studies are observational it is challenging to establish causality. One theory explaining the impact of loneliness on the body is biological routes.
Because of absence or poor quality of sleep, these include levels of protective hormones which create negative effects on the cardiovascular system, downregulation of the immunological system, and dysregulation of the neuroendocrine system.
Moreover, loneliness raises the possibility of people starting negative health practices such excessive alcohol use, overeating, smoking, and casual sexual activity as a kind of psychological release. A subjective feeling, loneliness comes from social isolation or from a lack of trust and connection with those around one.
Stress, irritation, and loneliness
Biomarkers of inflammation—interleukin-6, fibrinogen, and C-reactive protein—have been linked to loneliness. Other chronic diseases linked with early death as well as cardiovascular disease are caused in part by chronic inflammation.
Apart from hormonal consequences, psychological pressures can set off the autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system.
The direction of causality has not been established even if loneliness is linked with systematic inflammation and wear-and- tear impact in the neurological system.
Chronic activation of these systems and loneliness as a mortality risk factor (HPA) access can cause wear- and- tear on the cardiovascular, immunological, and metabolic systems.
The molecular circuits influenced by loneliness
Several suggested pathways of loneliness linked with cardiovascular disease have been put up. Loneliness turns on the sympathetic nervous system and the HPA access. This then influences behavior that includes sleep deprivation and physical inactivity.
The sympathetic nervous system’s activation improves a process known as monocytopenia in the bone marrow, which results in a growth of pro-inflammatory white blood cells. Furthermore driving monocytes from the spleen is the sympathetic nervous system.
Social stress can over time cause resistance to glucocorticoids, control of proinflammatory gene expression, and higher cytokine generation by immune cells. Glucocorticoids are hormones controlling various physiological processes. They also change blood glucose and lipolysis and help to treat inflammatory, allergy, and immunological diseases.
These effects help to control immune response therefore preventing overreaction and tissue damage under stress. Resistance to glucocorticoids later causes inflammation, muscular atrophy, central obesity, hepatic steatosis, osteoporosis, insulin resistance, hypertension, depression, and sleeplessness.
Moreover aggravating glucocorticoid resistance are cytokines. The formation of atherosclerotic plaques and higher blood pressure might be related to this resultant inflammation and oxidative stress.
Additionally causing vasoconstriction—which is also exacerbated by glucocorticoid resistance—are epinephrine and norepinephrine released by the brain and adrenal gland. Moreover, glucocorticoid resistance can lower the expression of endothelial nitric oxide synthase, therefore lowering the nitric oxide production. This therefore reduces vasodiation.
This adds even more to the raised blood pressure. While these channels are linked to the physiological changes in the body, their causal importance has not been shown.
Strategies and treatments to fight loneliness can be created only if one understands the relationship and causal routes between loneliness and ill-health.