Loneliness and Heart Disease: What the Literature Tells Us and What We Can Do to Help

Of the many things we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, one valuable lesson is that loneliness has a tremendous impact on health. Loneliness has been linked to a number of medical conditions in older patients, including depression, dementia, and heart disease. Loneliness, defined as “being without company,” is the subjective feeling of being socially isolated. A person can be alone without feeling lonely, just as one can have social support and yet still report feeling lonely. As part of the special section on Heart Disease and Matters of the Heart, we present recent literature on the impact of loneliness on heart disease as well as strategies to identify and combat loneliness in nursing home residents.