City Research Online

Abstract

Loneliness has been found to be associated with high levels of physical pain, health problems, and poor mental health. Questions remain about how these factors are interrelated and how the relationships vary across sexes and the lifespan. Here, we used data from the 2023 and 2024 Gallup World Poll (GWP) to explore global associations between loneliness and physical pain, while accounting for health problems, and psychological distress. Our sample had data from 256,760 individuals aged 15–100 from 139 countries. Fully adjusted regressions showed that lonely individuals had 2.1 times higher odds of experiencing physical pain, had 1.8 times higher odds of having health problems, and were 25.8% more likely to experience distress than non-lonely ones. Demographic characteristics and satisfaction with social support and opportunities to meet people statistically accounted for 14% of the association between loneliness and pain. Health problems statistically accounted for 18.9% of the same association, whereas distress statistically accounted for 60.2%. In formal regression models, the associations between loneliness and pain were slightly more pronounced in females than males, but similar across ages. Our findings show a strong association between loneliness and physical pain, that was to a large degree statistically accounted for by psychological distress, and to a lesser extent by physical health, and socio-economic disadvantage. Importantly, these associations varied in strength across countries, pointing towards the importance of cultural factors. These findings shed light on the necessity for further cross-cultural and longitudinal research into the relationship among loneliness, pain, and distress.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Human behaviour, Psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Psychology & Neuroscience
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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