Feeling lonely can increase blood pressure for people 50-plus

Add chronic feelings of loneliness to the factors that can cause high blood pressure in older adults.

Researchers at the University of Chicago say long-term loneliness can be a risk factor for hypertension in people 50 and older even when depression and stress are factored out.

"Loneliness behaved as though it is a unique health-risk factor in its own right," one of the researchers, Louise Hawkley, wrote in an article published in the current issue of the journal Psychology and Aging.

Hawkley is a senior research scientist with the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. She is part of a research team that has been exploring the impact of loneliness on health and quality-of-life issues.

The UC study is thought to be the first to link long-term feelings of loneliness and high blood pressure in people 50-plus.

That link was found to be independent of age and other factors that could cause blood pressure to rise. These include body-mass index, smoking, alcohol use and demographic differences such as race and income.

Over the course of five years the UC team studied a group of 229 people between the ages of 50 and 68. The randomly selected study subjects were from various ethnic groups, including Caucasian, African American and Latino.

Hawkley and her colleagues detected a connection between the feelings of loneliness subjects reported at the beginning of the study and rising blood pressure over the study period. "The increase associated with loneliness wasn't observable until two years into the study, but then continued to increase until four years later," she said.

The other members of the study team included: Ronald Thisted, chairman of Health Studies; Christopher Masi, assistant professor of Medicine; and John Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging and the John Templeton Foundation.