Loneliness and Social Isolation Are Linked to Faster Biological Aging
- Design
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- Participants
- 6,364
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- Funding
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This study suggests social connection may be relevant to slowing biological aging.
Being lonely or socially isolated is associated with measurably faster biological aging. Across over 340,000 UK Biobank participants and 6,300 NHANES participants, higher loneliness and isolation scores correlated with accelerated aging on multiple biomarker clocks. The effect was consistent across three different ways of measuring biological age. Faster biological aging also appeared to partly explain how loneliness connects to earlier death.
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