Loneliness is the 81-year-old woman who celebrated her birthday alone — after speaking with no one for more than a week before that. It is the woman who turned down a telehealth service that would have provided a virtual house call with a physician, because the doctor’s monthly home visit was her only human contact.

Although especially common in the elderly, loneliness can affect people across the age spectrum, and both men and women are equally prone to it.

About one-third of US adults age 45 and older report feeling lonely. While the findings that 35 percent of midlife and older adults are lonely is unchanged from 2010, the population of lonely people over age 45 has grown by 5 million, from 42.6 million to 47.8 million, in the past eight years. (source: AARP)

Geriatrician Carla Perissinotto was one of the first to publish in the medical literature about the health threats associated with loneliness. She followed 1,600 people out of a national Health and Retirement Study, over six years to see whether loneliness poses a risk to independence and mortality. It does: Feeling lonely results in a 60 percent  increased risk of functional decline and a 45 percent greater risk of death.

A stigma surrounds talking about loneliness, and it is intensified by ageism. “We want to ignore older people,” says Perissinotto. “We don’t want to talk about what it looks to not age successfully. We only want to hear about healthy aging.”

Dixon Chibanda says we should acknowledge the emotional discomfort of loneliness.

We’re not yet sure of the impact of technology on loneliness and social isolation. Holt-Lunstad reports a significant increase in the number of people who say they are lonely at the same time that social media became more popular, but we don’t yet know what is cause and what is effect.

Technology can be a valuable tool for making connections, but it offers no guarantee that it will relieve loneliness. “The power of human contact can not be underestimated,” Chibanda says.

Audience members and panelists describe many strategies and programs to tackle loneliness, among them public spaces designed to give people places to go, intergenerational living arrangements, and peer-based programs.

The Friendship Bench project in Zimbabwe is a mental health intervention that makes use of “community grandmothers” while “cuddle lounges” in the United Kingdom offer the benefit of physical touch. In Australia, “men’s sheds” allow men to work comfortably together “shoulder to shoulder” on woodworking projects.