---
title: "COVID Could Be Making People So Lonely That They’re Getting Sick"
description: "Loneliness is difficult to quantify, but scientists find that prolonged isolation can lead to both mental and physical medical conditions."
date: "2020-06-15"
modified: "2020-06-15"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/covid-lonely-sick"
categories:
  - "Health & Medicine"
tags:
  - "coronavirus"
  - "loneliness"
  - "neurosience medicine"
  - "Psychology"
---

# COVID Could Be Making People So Lonely That They’re Getting Sick

![Loneliness is difficult to quantify, but scientists find that prolonged isolation can lead to both mental and physical medical conditions.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Scientists-Reveal-Lockdown-Loneliness-Making-People-Sick.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: Pixabay\</em\>*

As we enter another week of pandemic lockdown, scientists are working to understand the toll extended isolation takes on our minds and bodies.

The medical effects of loneliness are difficult to measure — especially because loneliness is a subjective experience that varies wildly from person to person. But semantics aside, a clear trend is emerging, *[CNET ](<https://www.cnet.com/news/how-loneliness-could-be-changing-your-brain-and-body/>)*[reports](<https://www.cnet.com/news/how-loneliness-could-be-changing-your-brain-and-body/>), and it's not great.

Extended loneliness can have [serious psychological impacts](<https://futurism.com/neoscope/loneliness-scientists-developing-pill>), like exacerbated depression, anxiety, and increased irritability, [according to 2018 research](<https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)30142-9/fulltext>) posted in the journal *The Lancet*. But the impacts extend far beyond psychological health.

"It's very distressing when we are not a part of a group," Brigham Young University psychologist and neuroscientist Julianne Holt-Lundstad told *CNET*. "We have to deal with our environment entirely on our own, without the help of others, which puts our brain in a state of alert, but that also signals the rest of our body to be in a state of alert."

Loneliness has been linked to all sorts of medical problems, like cognitive decline in old age, cancer, and heart disease, *CNET* reports. Though the causal relationship between loneliness and disease is poorly understood, there seems to be a genetic mechanism, *potentially* triggered by prolonged loneliness, that increases the risk of those diseases.

"The subjective experience has to be translated somehow in the brain into biology, and so that's \[what\] we're looking at now," Turhan Canli, an integrative neuroscientist at Stony Brook University, told *CNET*.

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)