Why Heart Disease Patients Should Not Live Alone?

Sick people tend to recover more quickly when their family members accompany them because this would probably make them feel better. Of course, there might not have any scientific report to back this up.

But for people with heart disease, living alone is definitely not good since they would tend to die sooner than those who lived with others. This is what the researchers from Harvard Medical School and other institutions had reported on July 23, 2012 in the ‘Archives Of Internal Medicine’. Previous studies have already associated social isolation with heart attacks and weakened immune systems.

Patients living alone might be more difficult to get their medication refilled and take it regularly. They also do not have anyone at home to call the doctor's office or emergency help should they feel unwell. Furthermore, there are other mechanisms by which living alone could raise cardiac risk. For instance, social isolation and loneliness might play a role and these might be more challenging to fix.

More than 44,000 people from multiple countries, who aged 45 or older and had known heart disease or were at high risk of it, participated in the study. Over a period of 4 years, 7.7 percent of those younger than 65 living on their own died, compared to 5.7 percent of those who did not live alone. The gap was smaller for people who aged between 66 and 80. However, it remained statistically reliable even after accounting for age, sex, employment, ethnicity and country. The living situation of those who aged over 80 was, however, not tied to death rates.

According to researchers, people aged younger than 80 could face psychological and social problems like job strain or loneliness if they lived alone. By comparison, people who were older than 80 and lived alone might be healthier and more independent than those who do not.

Hence, they urged cardiologists to routinely question their patients whether they live alone, and if so, ensure the patients can get their medicine regularly. They also cautioned patients who lived alone not to ignore changes that might be a sign of health problems.

In fact, another paper that was also published in the ‘Archives Of Internal Medicine’ showed that older people who felt lonely had more difficulty performing basic tasks of daily living and died younger than those who did not feel alone.