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Can being lonely make you ill?

A study released this week is suggesting that loneliness or extended periods of isolation can actually change how the body functions at a molecular level.

Chronic social isolation is linked to heart disease and can also hurt our ability to fend off colds and other viruses. But the cause of those connections has been unclear. Can the sensation of loneliness actually change your biology?

The study, published in the current issue of Genome Biology, also points out the startling fact that it is the perception of loneliness that triggers the adverse health conditions, independent of how much social interaction an individual actually has.

Which basically mean’s that even someone with hundreds of “friends” on Facebook or other social networking web sites might think of themselves as a lonely person.

Researchers believe that chronic social isolation sets off a biological chain reaction that causes normal immune responses to malfunction.

Assistant Professor Steven Cole at the UCLA School of Medicine and the study’s lead author says, “Chronically lonely people have a subjective theory of the world that says that people can’t be trusted…It’s not that they’re hostile; they just perceive the world as somewhat more threatening.”

That perception cues the body to produce a stress hormone called cortisol. In a healthy immune system, cortisol tells a group of genes to shut down the body’s inflammatory response. But in a person who’s chronically stressed or anxious due to loneliness, that process is altered.

For most people a low level of inflammation is normal; it means the body is performing general maintenance and responding to minor, sometimes unnoticeable threats. However, high levels of inflammation are worrisome. In autoimmune diseases, for example, the body attacks its own tissues and causes an increase in inflammation. Inflammation is also linked to a number of serious health risks, including cancer.

Cole and his colleagues found that lonely individuals consistently had higher levels of inflammation even though they were producing a slightly higher level of cortisol-the hormone that should be shutting down the inflammatory response.

The receptors, Cole says, were not responding properly, probably because they were receiving a constant stream of cortisol. “If you send a signal to a receptor all day long it will stop listening,” says Cole. “Essentially, it’s like the immune system saying that cortisol is crying wolf.”

That accounts for the higher levels of inflammation the researchers observed in chronically lonely individuals. But they also found other faulty immune responses: lonely people produced fewer antibodies, which the body uses to tag pathogens, like bacteria and viruses. They also had a lower antiviral response; a group of genes involved in fighting viruses were not expressing themselves as much. “The risky parts of the immune system are going too hard, and the health-protective parts are not going hard enough,” says Cole.

“Loneliness is inherently subjective,” says Steven Asher, a psychology professor at Duke University who was not affiliated with the study. Asher has spent decades studying friendship and loneliness and says that an individual’s level of social interaction does not necessarily say anything about his or her loneliness.

“You can measure how many friends they have, and whether they provide support, but the only way you can know if somebody is lonely is to ask them,” says Asher.

He has observed individuals with many friends who will report being lonely and, on the opposite side, those with few friends who do not. And, like Cole, Asher has found that lonely individuals tend to have a distinctly different outlook on social interactions.

“We find that people who are lonely are more socially anxious,” Asher says. “They’re definitely feeling more stress and more anxiety.”

So what should you do if your lonely then? Harvard Medical School experts suggest talk therapy. For those who want to tackle the loneliness head on, helping others can be a fantastic way to make essential social connections.

Tutoring in a subject you know at a local school or any kind of volunteer work can provide all-around benefits and bring you close to people of like mind. Even just one new but meaningful contact can make all the difference. And to manage creeping stress, you can take some basic relaxation measures like meditation or paced breathing.