Sick? Lonely? Genes tell the tale — sort of:
John Cacioppo, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has been studying the health effects of loneliness for years in a group of people who have allowed him to delve in-depth into their social lives and health.Cole and Cacioppo’s team studied 14 of these volunteers — six who scored in the top 15 percent of an accepted scale of loneliness.
“These are people who said for four years straight ‘there’s really nobody that I feel that close to’,” Cole said.
The other eight were the least lonely of the group.
Cole’s team took blood and studied the gene activity of their immune system cells — the white blood cells that protect from invaders such as viruses and bacteria.
All 22,000 human genes were studied and compared, and 209 stood out in the loneliest people.
“These 200 genes weren’t sort of a random mishmash of genes. They were part of a highly suspicious conspiracy of genes. A big fraction of them seemed to be involved in the basic immune response to tissue damage,” Cole said.
Others were involved in the production of antibodies — the tag the body uses to mark microbes or damaged cells for removal, Cole said.
The findings suggest that the loneliest people had unhealthy levels of chronic inflammation, which has been associated with heart and artery disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s and other ills.
The next step is to see if this might be treated, Cole said. “This is a biological target for intervention,” he said. “Maybe we can give these people aspirin.” Aspirin, an anti-inflammatory drug, is also a blood thinner taken regularly by many people to prevent heart attacks and stroke.
The report is available freely online in the journal Genome Biology at http://genomebiology.com/.