Can Loneliness Kill You?
How a pair of psychologists uncovered a link between isolation, the immune system, and our genes
Like most scientists, Steve Cole didn’t believe things happened without reason. But no matter which variable he tested—and he tried all the usual suspects, from sleep to sex—nothing seemed to explain why the gay men were dying.
It was the late 1980s, the age that gave us the personal computer, the disposable contact lens, and The Simpsons — but also the Challenger explosion, the global stock market crash, and “new” Coke. AIDS was raging in the United States.
Cole was a young psychology researcher who’d landed on a study of 988 HIV-positive, AIDS-free gay men¹, and he was trying to crack the workings of the lethal virus. Over nine years, Cole tracked 80 of these men. Every six months, they gave blood, sat for interviews, and filled in questionnaires. Every time, there were fewer and fewer of them. A significant number fell sick, many perished. And as they did, Cole wondered why some subjects succumbed to HIV while others were able to resist it. He looked at the obvious—age, socioeconomic status, overall health, sleep quality, exercise habits, sex life, anxiety levels, depression history—but none of these predicted who would get AIDS or how soon they’d die.
