Loneliness Can Literally Break Your Heart, Science Says (Video)

Social isolation has been cited as a factor in the untimely and self-inflicted deaths of celebrity personalities like Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain in recent weeks, but loneliness can also be bad for the heart in not just a figurative psychological sense, but physically as well.

A study presented Saturday at the European Society of Cardiology’s annual nursing conference finds that people who feel lonely are at a higher risk of premature death from heart disease.

“Loneliness is more common today than ever before, and more people live alone,” explained study author Anne Vinggaard Christensen, a PhD student at Copenhagen University Hospital, in a release.

The study used survey data from 13,463 patients diagnosed with any of a handful of different types of heart disease, including ischaemic heart disease, arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm), heart failure and heart valve disease. The researchers found that female heart disease patients who also reported loneliness had double the mortality risk of those who did not. The risk of death was also nearly doubled in male patients.