More than a quarter of adult Dutch people sometimes feel lonely. Loneliness not only makes you unhappy, it is also bad for your health. It has previously been associated with an increased risk of dementia, but for the first time a relationship has now also been found with Parkinson’s.
Loneliness is not about the amount of social contact you have, but about how you feel about it. You can define it as a negative feeling that arises from a discrepancy between how much social contact you want and how much contact you have. Lonely people are more likely to live unhealthy lives and have illnesses more often. This is partly because they suffer more from depression, exercise less and are more likely to have other health problems, such as diabetes.
More and more Parkinson’s
Loneliness increases the risk of all kinds of ailments, such as cardiovascular disease and dementia. This is largely due to the unhealthy lifestyle of lonely people. But now a link has even been found with Parkinson’s. And that is interesting, since the number of people with Parkinson’s is increasing rapidly. In fact, the condition is now the second most common neurodegenerative disease. In 2021, it is estimated that more than 6,000 people in the Netherlands were diagnosed, two-thirds of whom were men. In total, almost 53,000 people lived with the condition that year, which goes far beyond just shaking hands. Parkinson’s patients also suffer from fatigue, difficulty speaking, depression, cognitive decline and intestinal problems. The causes are largely unknown, although a link is increasingly being made with exposure to pesticides in people who worked in agriculture or horticulture, for example.
Lonely Brits
And there now seems to be a link with loneliness. To that conclusion came researchers from the Florida State University after analyzing data from the well-known British Biobank. Researcher Antonio Terracciano tells Scientias.nl: “Between 2006 and 2010, the UK Biobank asked 500,000 adults in the UK to answer questions about health and lifestyle, including loneliness. In addition, we used data on the diagnosis of dementia from the UK National Health Service.” For example, regarding loneliness, British adults had to answer the question: “Do you ever feel lonely?” The answer was ‘yes’ or ‘no’. So there was no scale from, for example, 1 to 5. The participants were followed for fifteen years. The analysis produced shocking results. “Compared to people who did not call themselves lonely, lonely participants were 37 percent more likely to have Parkinson’s,” says Terracciano.
The researchers tried to correct as best as possible for other factors such as age, gender, genetic risk, but also physical activity, depression and diabetes. “After correction, it turned out that lonely people still had a 25 percent higher risk of Parkinson’s,” the researcher said. That increased risk was the same for all ages and genders. It is unclear whether loneliness also has an impact on the severity or course of the disease.
Social isolation versus loneliness
Interestingly, there is a difference between social isolation and loneliness. Social isolation is actually more objective: it’s about how often you see people, while loneliness is more of a feeling: no matter how many people you see, you can still feel lonely. And strangely enough, there only turned out to be a link between loneliness and Parkinson’s. “A surprising result was that social isolation was not related to the risk of Parkinson’s. Social isolation is measured as a combination of living alone, the number of visits from family and friends, and the number of social activities a person engages in. While loneliness is a significant predictor of Parkinson’s, social isolation, or a small social network, appears not to be so at all,” the researcher concludes.
That’s special. You would expect that the amount of social contact is more important than the feeling you have about it. It must be said that it is unclear what is cause and what is effect. No matter how well an attempt has been made to correct for as many factors as possible, it is still possible that people who feel lonely may also have other complaints that increase the risk of Parkinson’s.
2023-10-07 12:02:39
#Lonely #people #develop #Parkinsons
