- Web Desk
- 2 Hours ago

Adults living alone may face higher risk of cancer death, study suggests
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- Web Desk
- Oct 25, 2023

ISLAMABAD: Adults living by themselves may have a higher risk of dying from cancer compared with those who live with others, a new study suggests.
The research, published in the journal Cancer, found that among 114,772 working-age adults who lived alone, 2.5 percent of them died of cancer during the study period.
In comparison, among 358,876 adults who lived with others, a much smaller share — 1.6 percent— died of cancer in the study. Adults ages 18 to 64 were enrolled in the study and researchers found the strongest association was in those ages 45 to 64.
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“We found that working adults living alone had a 1.32 times higher risk of cancer death than adults living with others,” said Dr. Farhad Islami, an author of the study and senior scientific director of cancer disparity research at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. That suggests that adults living alone have about a 32 percent higher risk of cancer death.
Compared with adults living with others, adults living alone were more likely to have fair or poor self-reported health status, activity limitation, serious psychological distress, severe obesity, smoke cigarettes, or consume alcohol, according to the study.
This isn’t the first time that research has found living alone to be associated with increased health risks. Separate studies have previously found that living alone may be associated with a higher risk of being diagnosed with cancer, or even any cause of death.
