In 2023, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a report on what he called the nation's loneliness epidemic. According to the report, even before the COVID-19 epidemic began in 2020, about half of U.S. adults reported measurable levels of loneliness.

Social isolation and loneliness can lead to health problems that can be almost as bad for your body as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

People who often feel lonely have a 29 percent greater risk of heart disease, a 32 percent greater risk of stroke and a greater than 60 percent chance of premature death than those who are not lonely. They are also more than twice as likely to develop depression. Older adults who describe themselves as lonely are at a 50 percent greater risk for developing dementia.

The number of contacts that participants said they had never met in person was directly associated with self-reported loneliness.

Excessive social media use may be one important contributor to loneliness. The findings of studies looking at the association between social media and loneliness, however, have been mixed. Most studies have focused on social media use among teens and young adults, but what about the impact of social media on older adults?

To get a better understanding of how social media use might affect this older group, researchers from Oregon State University studied the association between social media use and loneliness among adults between the ages of 30 and 70 years old.

Midlife and older adults represent 75 percent of the U.S. population and are widely exposed to social media, Brain Primack, lead author on the study, said in a statement, adding the negative health effects of loneliness get worse as people age.

More than 1,500 people were enrolled in the research. Participants were asked about their contacts on social media — specifically, how many of their online contacts they knew and considered close personal friends and how many they had never met in person. Based on the responses to this questionnaire, the researchers categorized about 25 percent of participants as lonely.

Interactions on social media can lead to the idealization of people's friendships with others on those platforms because there is no reality to temper those idealized impressions.

About 35 percent of all participants' social media contacts were people whom they had never met and about 55 percent were close friends. The number of contacts that participants said they had never met in person was directly associated with self-reported loneliness. Participants with the most contacts they had never met were more than twice as likely to report that they were lonely than those with the fewest never-met contacts.

“People experiencing loneliness may wish to examine their interactions with strangers on social media and prioritize in-person connections over social media one,” said Primack, a professor of public health at Oregon State.

People may feel lonely when they never meet their social media contacts in person because interactions on social media can lead to the idealization of people's friendships with others on those platforms. Such idealization can make the damaging effects of social comparison worse.

“This idealization is probably stronger when those friendships involve people you've never met, because there is no personal experience to counter that idealization,” coauthor Jessica Gorman, an associate professor of health promotion and behavior at Oregon State, said in a statement.

The researchers point out that connecting online with your real-life friends was not associated with increased loneliness, but it was also not associated with decreased loneliness.

The study is published in Public Health Reports.