Harmful loneliness like smoking 15 cigarettes / day

British experts confirm the impact on health is the same as the impact of obesity or smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

According to The Sun, experts say loneliness can accelerate dementia and increase the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure.

New research shows that half of people aged 75 and older live alone and at least one-tenth of 10 million people over 65 in the UK are negatively affected by loneliness.

Loneliness adversely affects the health of the elderly - (Photo: Shutterstock)

Five million older people, half of them, said television was their co-worker and more than half a million people admitted they left home less than once a week.

Recent research by WRVS, a charity that helps British elderly people, has identified nearly 400,000 elderly people who said they have children but their children are too busy to visit them.

The older people live farther from their children, the worse the situation is. Research by WRVS shows that for 10% of parents over 75 years old, the nearest child lived an hour away by car.

And among them, half were visited only once every 2-6 months.

In 2010, researchers at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (USA) also noted that loneliness harmed the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.