Healthy Aging & Clinical Care in the Elderly

Loneliness is a significant but neglected circumstance in which many individuals, particularly the elderly, find themselves. This review aims to discuss the various effects that loneliness has on mental and physical health and the potential interventions that may alleviate this problem. This review used the PubMed, ScienceDirect, and WHO IRIS databases to search for relevant studies on the topic, mainly focusing on longitudinal studies due to the difficulty in distinguishing the causality between loneliness and its associated factors. In collating these studies, loneliness can be shown to be a significant independent risk factor for a number of conditions such as poor health behaviors (eg, smoking and alcohol consumption), physical health problems (eg, hypertension and motor decline), and psychiatric conditions (eg, depression and cognitive impairment). The interventions discussed, both low tech and high tech, have the potential to benefit patients at both an individual level and a population-wide level.