Loneliness affects sleep quatity, then heath

People feeling lonely tend to have poorer sleep than those feeling connected, a latest study shows, implying sleep may be the missing link between loneliness and poor health. The study, done by Lianne Kurina, Ph.D., an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Chicago and his colleagues, was published Tuesday in the journal Sleep. To find the link between loneliness and sleep quality, the study authors recorded the awakenings or fragmentations during the sleep of 95 participants from South Dakota in a week. The study noted that sleep fragmentation is a better indicator of sleep quality than the length of time that elapsed between falling asleep and morning awakening, subjects' personal assessment of their sleep quality, or their reported daytime sleepiness. The researchers found the more lonely the participants feel, the more frequent their awakenings were. This finding offers new evidence to suggest that sleep may be the missing link between loneliness and health. Prior researchers have found a clear relationship between loneliness and health, and a link between poor sleep quality and ill health, but the connection between loneliness and sleep was rarely studied and thereby unidentified. "Sleep could be a pathway through which perceived social isolation influences health," the authors wrote in their study.