Feeling lonely?  Well, that might make you sick.  The mechanism?  Well, here’s the surprise.  Patterns of genetic expression.

 Here’s the press release from Genome Biology, “People who experience chronically high levels of loneliness show gene-expression patterns that differ markedly from those of people who don’t feel lonely.”  The study’s lead author, Steven Cole, notes: “In this study, changes in immune cell gene expression were specifically linked to the subjective experience of social distance.  The differences we observed were independent of other known risk factors for inflammation, such as health status, age, weight, and medication use. The changes were even independent of the objective size of a person’s social network. What counts, at the level of gene expression, is not how many people you know, it’s how many you feel really close to over time.”    Continue reading “Loneliness and Health: Experience, Stress, and Genetics”