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- Loneliness has been linked to depression and other health problems.
- Now, a study says it can also spread.
- A friend of a lonely person was 52 percent more likely to develop feelings of loneliness.
- And a friend of that friend was 25 percent more likely to do the same.
- Earlier findings showed that happiness, obesity and the ability to stop smoking can also spread like infections within social groups.
- The findings all come from a major health study in the American town of Framingham, Massachusetts.
- The new findings involved more than 5,000 people in the second generation of the Framingham Heart Study.
- The researchers examined friendship histories and reports of loneliness.
- The results established a pattern that spread as people reported fewer close friends.
- For example, loneliness can affect relationships between next-door neighbors.
- The loneliness spreads as neighbors who were close friends now spend less time together.
- The study also found that loneliness spreads more easily among women than men.
- Researchers from the University of Chicago, Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, did the study.
- The average person is said to experience feelings of loneliness about 48 days a year.
- The study found that having a lonely friend can add about 17 days.
- But every additional friend can decrease loneliness by about five percent, or two and a half days.
- Lonely people become less and less trusting of others.
- This makes it more and more difficult for them to make friends and more likely that society will reject them.
- John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago led the study.
- He says it is important to recognize and deal with loneliness.
- He says people who have been pushed to the edges of society should receive help to repair their social networks.
- The aim should be to aggressively create what he calls a "protective barrier" against loneliness.
- This barrier, he says, can keep the whole network from coming apart.