Loneliness is higher among middle-aged Americans than older ones

Across the world, loneliness tends to increase after midlife. But for reasons that aren’t altogether clear, the United States is an outlier, with loneliness steadily decreasing from the middle to later years of life, researchers report April 22 in Aging and Mental Health.

Most attention and policies addressing loneliness in the United States target the elderly or, recently, teens and young adults, whose rates of mental health problems have surged. “Middle-aged adults really have been a neglected population,” says Robin Richardson, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta. And that leaves them vulnerable to mental and physical health problems associated with loneliness, including cognitive decline, reduced quality of life and even higher risk of death. 

Richardson and colleagues crunched data from three demographic surveys involving over 64,000 people aged 50 to 90 across 29 countries. Loneliness was measured through questions assessing how often people felt left out, isolated or lacking companionship. Respondents answered on a scale from 0 (“hardly ever”) to 6 (“often”). The surveys also gauged people’s mental and physical health and employment status. 

In three-quarters of the countries surveyed, loneliness increased with age, while it stayed flat in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Austria. Denmark had the lowest levels overall.

In general, loneliness was linked to unemployment, depression, poor health and being single. But age and contributing factors varied widely by country. For most countries, joblessness correlated with higher loneliness among elderly respondents. But that pattern was reversed in the United States.

The team also measured age inequalities in loneliness within countries on a scale from -1 to 1, with negative scores indicating higher loneliness among younger populations relative to older ones and positive scores the reverse. The United States had the lowest score at -0.08. Only the Netherlands came close, with a score of -0.064.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, Richardson says. The surveys, she says, did not capture all the factors tied to loneliness. In the United States, for example, health and job status explained only 80 percent of midlife loneliness. Moving forward, researchers should drill down on societal contributors such as access to child and elder care, Richardson says. “In the U.S. context at least, I think there is a story to be told about how middle-aged adults have very constrained leisure time.”