Meta-Analysis of 2.2m People: Loneliness Increases Mortality Risk by 32%
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
lightcapai.medium.comResearchstoryHigh profile
calmmixed
Debate
80/100
LonelinessHealthSocial Isolation
Key topics
Loneliness
Health
Social Isolation
A meta-analysis of 2.2M people found that loneliness increases mortality risk by 32%, sparking discussion on the causes and consequences of loneliness, as well as potential solutions.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
38m
Peak period
127
0-12h
Avg / period
19.4
Comment distribution136 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 136 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 29, 2025 at 9:25 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 29, 2025 at 10:03 AM EDT
38m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
127 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 7, 2025 at 2:35 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45413481Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:00:11 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
No mistake, almost all of us can refer to an anecdote of an elderly relative dying soon after their spouse. It can be both tragic and, in hindsight, romantic. But really, the consequences of loneliness are often and unfortunately quite practical.
So I guess you have:
bad company < no company < good company
Medical emergencies might be a cherry on the cake - but let's not forget that most diseases are not instantaneous - and sooner these are cached, less harm.
Why?
Besides, smoking has largely been banned from buildings, so that habit doesn't make it convenient to gather with others, except perhaps huddled outside the door.
I could've sworn there was a paper, (or maybe just an article? can't remember), a long time ago about the community on a Mediterranean island somewhere? The thesis was that people there were living abnormally long lives because of the Mediterranean style food they ate, and how socially active and interconnected they were in old age.
Thanks!
So for example, it's possible that if you already have chronic illness, a disability, or any other kind of health issues, you're more likely to have higher social isolation and therefore be more lonely, in addition to having a higher mortality risk. There's an outside variable (your health) that is correlated with both (loneliness and mortality), but that doesn't necessarily mean that loneliness causes mortality. If this were the case, we could defend claims like "autism increases mortality", because we already know that autism increases social isolation.
The challenge here is that healthy people don’t desire to be around unhealthy people.
Society provides no incentive or social benefit for otherwise healthy people to be around the unwell to call the ambulances. Even as a nurse, hospice worker or caregiver, the pay/benefits are non existent for the amount of emotional and physical labor needed for care.
And if the person is unsure whether the situation is critical, they might try to "sleep it off" rather than driving or getting a ride, because ER is also kind of expensive and you could be stuck there all day.
She's not wrong...
The problem is that this article is overstating the effect on mortality because its not controlling for confounding factors very well.
Of course there is. If you are alone at home, who calls an ambulance if you have a heart attack or similar condition? If you are living together with someone, the chance they are arund while it happens is all thats needed to skew the statistics.
The loneliness-associated protein study linked in TFA doesn't seem to control for health status. So preexisting conditions may have affected the correlations.
When you are chronically ill, socializing falls pretty rapidly down your list of priorities.
We are fundamentally social primates; there are prior studies demonstrating the overt harms of isolation and ostracization in humans, primates, and other mammals. Our immune systems, metabolism, and cardiovascular health are all tied intimately to things like stress and hormones, with feedback effects that can amplify disorder, or suppress it, depending on the directionality of the inputs.
I see the "just so" element of explanation to this study, but I think that even if the underlying causal factors are more complex, it is so directionally correct that I have no problem with the conclusion of the study, even if it's not correctly justified scientifically.
Its frustrating, because cohort study experimental designs like these can in principle chip away at reverse causality (i.e. observe loneliness exposure before a cardiovascular disease prognosis, compare difference-in-difference between treatment/control), but the meta-analysis doesnt clearly state whether this constraint was applied. But even a study like this would have issues with medical participation, so that would need to be controlled, preferably with a prospective design.
Maybe the researcher above touches on these things, but more generally, there should be a standardized probability and statistics exam for ALL aspiring scientific researchers, and a high score should be the minimum cutoff. The influence that a statistically flawed study can have over our collective futures is too dangerous.
An even bigger danger: with all of the flawed / p-hacked / over-hyped studies, the public (and the legislature) will start to believe that NO science is real.
It worries me how much argument there is over things I consider to be facts. And how much effort goes into undermining science when it is not in the corporate interest (eg cigarette manufacturers funding “inconclusive” studies).
once I heard Feynmann say in a youtube video that (paraphrasal) "we don't know what causes gravity, we just know that it exists, it's a property of matter"
then I realized, our experiments never show causation, they only show correlation. gravity has 100% (in our experience) correlation to matter. admittedly, that's a pretty good correlation, but for all we know, gravity causes matter. energy too, apparently.
David Hume was famous for arguing in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that we can't observe it and we instead have a "custom" or habit of expecting effects to follow causes.
> After the constant conjunction of two objects—heat and flame, for instance, weight and solidity—we are determined by custom to expect the one from the appearance of the other.
Religious philosophers have sometimes gone to the extreme of occasionalism, where they've maintained that patterns and regularities in nature were just habits or customs that God chooses to follow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
Are you aware that life expectancy is much lower for peel with autism than the general public?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6713622/
What you say sounds true about chronic illness and isolation. These researchers are looking at research done using actual interventions and real results.
What should they do to analyze this more than RCTs and then meta-analysis of RCTs?
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... Tackling social disconnection: an umbrella review of RCT-based interventions targeting social isolation and loneliness
We cannot explore the possibilities of truth if we do that, but I can appreciate the due diligence. It’s a tricky subject, but life experience informs many of us that there is something more going on than “I materially feel like shit”.
There is a taboo element to loneliness that isn’t often discussed, and that is “I feel hurt that I can be left alone, or that anyone can be left alone or isolated”. So, while the source of the isolation could be material, the feeling that manifests from it is an actual hurt that one feels from the actual thing (isolation). For example, we may be killing our elders when we isolate them in care facilities.
I can’t say if we have the sense as a society to accept data that suggests this pain can be linked to mortality. Isolation in itself isn’t the killer, it’s the pain of “well how could any society leave anyone alone”, and such a phenomenon can be witnessed in the macro outside of yourself (how can we leave people on the street? Etc).
Loneliness and isolation is often in sequence, after abandonment, or negligence, or unforgivingness (if the person “deserved” the isolating). A phantom, immeasurable pain. And even more painful, to deny it afterwards.
I think that the university was concerned with liability. I still think that it's a good idea.
In their homes? It's a mountain of liability. The elderly tend to be a combination of paranoid and senile.
The first time they misplace a checkbook or forget some valuable was already given to some grandchild they'll accuse the most recent new guest in memory of stealing.
And that's just one of an infinite number of possibilities having spent zero time dwelling on it.
Or, "we're adults, just do it". The U can't actually stop of-age students from volunteering for local organizations, or joining churches, or playing soccer in a city park.
https://adoptaunabuelo.org
I think a good study would be the effects of likes, upvotes and karma on overall lifespan. I’d bet that people who gain more upvotes and positive engagement in general probably live much longer than people who are chronically downvoted or ignored.
The ones who should do this study would be the CIA. They could remotely kill people by giving them negative social feedback all the time. It would also give weight to online harassment complaints.
As someone who spends a lot of time alone, one of my big fears is having a medical emergency, even just choking on food, and dying from something that would be easily avoided had another person been in the house. I've gone and looked up how to give myself the Heimlich maneuver on myself, and play out that scenario in my head all the time... or trying to get to a neighbor's house or just outside where someone might see me. Mindfulness won't help if this is how I meet my fate, actually community and relationships would.
I was alone, but luckily I was only 19 and healthy at the time. But I came away with a new understanding of the dangers of these things and whys there’s so much advertising to older people it. I can imagine a frail individual not surviving something like that if alone.
I’m thankful my dad is into tech and has an Apple Watch. He does a lot of walking, watch is good to keep him mobile. But just last year he stepped backward off a curb and fell in a parking lot. The Apple Watch went off and was ready to call for an ambulance had he needed it.
20 years ago he was worried about falls with his mom, he was thinking of solutions for this and wanted to make a device the seniors would need to check-in with every hour. A missed check-in would trigger a call to emergency contacts. The various monitors on the watch seem much more elegant and less annoying, while being a step up from Life Alert.
However, with the Apple Watch needing a smart phone, charging, and general know-how, I don’t see it as a viable general purpose safeguard for seniors. At least not for a while longer. I don’t think my would get a smart watch for fall detection, and she’s made some comments that worry me. I think she’s fallen several times and hasn’t really told anyone.
It's like someone advises you to go to the gym and you say but I drive everywhere. Yes they're not conflicting. In fact unless you live in a place like NYC or London, you need to be good at both.
I think I feel you and I hope that if something like that were to happen, you would have people willing to offer and give that help and you'd be willing to ask for and receive that help.
My great-grandmother was different. her husband died young. she had 50 more years of life after that. She gardened, she sewed, she pickled and canned. She established a strong personal identity and experienced evergreen personal growth. She was a happy woman, cackling all of the time when we'd visit. When she died at 95, it was a surprise, she seemed very alive and healthy shortly beforehand. She died in her sleep, no chronic diseases.
Makes me think that 32% might be traced to psychological/sociological factors.
That was quite common for much of the 20th century.
My mother in law lost her husband when she was in her early 60s, and I was worried that she would suffer the same fate as your grandma. She sold her house after a few years to escape the ghosts and moved into a condo near me. Her social schedule is jam-packed.
There is so much to be said about having your own identity, hobbies, and passions.
I've been married for over 30 years and we both have our own independent identities and successes (as well as shared ones). We are still very close and loving. Neither needs the other to live but after so long our emotional involvement with each other is as deep and foundational as the roots of a great tree. Losing her (or her me) would be utterly devastating and how we identify ourselves has nothing to do with it.
He's posting about two substantial (~10-30 pages) papers per week to the arXiv, in various areas of mathematics. He claims to have developed "Alpay Algebra: A recursive language for thought" and what he's written about it looks to me like (1) it was actually written by an LLM and (2) it's basically word/symbol salad. (He has some papers about it on the arXiv. The first isn't particularly bullshitty, but uses a great deal of formalism to say almost nothing. Later ones look like grandiose AI-written slop. And he has some web pages that are just grandiose AI-written slop.)
I repeat: none of this needs to cast any particular doubt on what he writes about loneliness. He might be an AI-driven mathematical crank who also has wise thoughts about loneliness. I might just be wrong about his being an AI-driven mathematical crank, though I'd be pretty surprised. Or, for that matter, his post about loneliness might be AI-written but none the less correct. (It's the kind of thing I would expect an LLM to be able to write something reasonable about -- though in that case it would be advisable to double-check the references.) But it doesn't inspire confidence.
Yes, that's my only issue with the article :)
So missing the good German bread.
Doesn't say where 'here' is.
Is it generally understood as feeling (being in a particular state of mind) as being lonely or just lacking social interactions in general, regardless of how one feels about it? Those two things, to my understanding, aren't the same. For example, I never had friends, and generally, I despise people. I have no "social life," and I wouldn't even be able to clearly define what it is without googling. If I lost my voice, I wouldn't notice that it happened for about a week. However, I don't feel like I am missing out on anything. Does that increase my mortality risk by over 30% or not? I only skimmed the sources, but may read it later.
There was the famous incident involving Gene Hackman. His care taker was his wife. The wife collapsed/died due to Henta virus and he passed a week later oblivious to what had happened to her. If Gene Hackman and his wife had more proactive support network (the kids or friends FaceTime them everyday), maybe this tragedy could have been avoided.
I’m curious what the research says about interacting online in e.g. Discord servers and other forums for niche communities. Also, is calling your childhood friend on the regular more or less potent than meeting IRL but recently-made friends?
I am lonely because I have dealt with too many assholes. And if it kills me sooner, good. Humanity is a garbage species full of opportunistic and adversarial people just waiting to find new people to exert power over.
I can't wait to leave this hellhole.
Remember to offset loneliness with coworkers, friends, and roommates.
The causality is reversed. Unhealthy people socialize less, this explains every correlation result cited, it is a simple explanation, which doesn't need to invent some mystic force which turns people healthy, when they talk to other people.
Unless there is incredibly strong evidence that the reversed causation is wrong, no other explanation should be accepted over it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368911
And what, pray tell, works? He goes on:
>Those programs in Barcelona where almost half the people stopped feeling lonely? The mindfulness stuff that works in just two weeks? Even the robot pets for elderly people “it all works”. We’re not talking about maybe or possibly here. This stuff actually works. What gets me is that fixing loneliness doesn’t require some massive revolution. Twenty minutes of mindfulness a day. A weekly volunteer shift.
Slop.
https://cyclingwithoutage.org/
We're an international movement whereby volunteer cyclists pedal passengers around on what is essentially a small couch on wheels. The elderly get out into their neighbourhood while engaging with volunteers in conversation, jokes, and memories. The benefits of even brief but regular social connection are lasting, as we hear from medical professionals and care home workers and the residents themselves and their families.
There's a great TED Talk on it which inspired us to start a local chapter almost eight years ago. We are in high demand and growing so if you're looking for a healthy way to serve others, consider getting in touch with your local chapter (or starting it!)
Even as an introvert I can easily see if I didn't have a partner and access to friends and socialization I'd be significantly more likely to kill myself.
Before my mother started joining more retiree clubs I could literally see on her face how much more weathered and haggard she was. The isolation was physically visible on her face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic#Causes_of_...
The authors mean increased /odds/, not likelihood (probability). WHy does it matter? Well, when your whole paper is a statistical exercise, misusing basic statistical language in the abstract is not a great sign.
I've heard of some efforts to pair retirement homes and preschools in some way, to benefit both, and I'd love to see that idea work in some way. I expect it to have many liability challenges but would be so good for both parties.
28 more comments available on Hacker News