Feelings of loneliness associated with increased risk for type 2 diabetes over 20 years
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Type 2 diabetes risk was more than twice as high among adults who reported feeling most lonely compared with those who reported no loneliness, according to study results published in Diabetologia.
“Research that aims to establish whether loneliness is a risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes is still in its early days,” Roger Ekeberg Henriksen, PhD, of the department of health and social sciences at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Norway, and colleagues wrote. “However, the few studies that do exist indicate that the association between loneliness and type 2 diabetes may be of clinical importance.”
Researchers analyzed data from the Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT), a large longitudinal health study of 24,024 adults from central Norway. Researchers evaluated data on self-reports of loneliness from the HUNT2 survey from 1995 to 1997 and data on HbA1c levels from the HUNT4 survey from 2017 to 2019 to assess associations between loneliness and type 2 diabetes.
Overall, 4.9% of participants (mean age, 43.3 years; 56% women) developed type 2 diabetes during the 20-year follow-up period of the HUNT study. At baseline, 12.6% of participants reported various degrees of feeling lonely.
In the logistic regression analyses, participants who reported more loneliness at baseline had higher odds for developing type 2 diabetes during the ensuing 20 years (per category change in loneliness: adjusted OR = 1.13; 95% CI, 1-1.28). Participants who felt the most loneliness experienced a twofold higher risk for type 2 diabetes risk compared with participants who did not feel lonely (aOR = 2.19; 95% CI, 1.16-4.15).
In addition, researchers noted that the effect of loneliness on type 2 diabetes development was only weakly mediated by sleep maintenance insomnia and not at all by other insomnia subtypes or depressive symptoms.
“Contrary to our expectations, we did not find support for the hypothesis that depressive symptoms mediate the association between loneliness and type 2 diabetes,” the researchers wrote. “This was unexpected as loneliness has previously been recognized as a major risk factor for depression, while depression has been reported to be a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.”
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