The reason loneliness could be bad for your health

　　孤獨會對你的健康不利的原因

　　SCIENCE has many uses, but it doesn't often produce handy pick-up lines. Recent work on thegenetics of disease, however, suggest a way of opening a conversation with that solitaryattractive stranger in a bar: loneliness can make you ill.

　　科學有很多用處，但是它通常不會給你順口的搭訕理由。然而，近來對疾病遺傳學的研究卻給了我們一個在酒吧里跟某個孤單的吸引你的陌生人搭訕的理由：孤獨會讓你生病。

　　Lonely people, it seems, are at greater risk than the gregarious of developing illnesses associated with chronic inflammation, such as heart disease and certain cancers. According to a paper published last year in the Public Library of Science, Medicine, the effect on mortality of loneliness is comparable with that of smoking and drinking. It examined, and combined the results of, 148 previous studies that followed some 300,000 individuals for an average period of 7.5 years each, and controlled for factors such as age and pre-existing illness. It concluded that, over such a period, a gregarious person has a 50% better chance of surviving than a lonely one.

　　孤獨的人跟愛交際的人相比，似乎患跟慢性炎癥相關的疾病——如心臟病和某些癌癥——的風險更大。據去年發表在《科學公共圖書館——醫學》雜志上的一篇論文稱，孤獨對死亡率的影響跟抽煙和酗酒相當。文章仔細檢查了148個先前的研究(這些研究跟蹤觀察了大約30萬人，每人平均跟蹤觀察7年半)，并綜合其結果，還控制了諸如年齡和已患疾病此類因素，最后下結論：超過這樣一段時間，一個愛交際的人比一個孤獨的人的生存率高50%。

　　Steven Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks he may know why this is so. He told the AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, about his work studying the expression of genes in lonely people. Dr Cole harvested samples of white blood cells from both lonely and gregariouspeople. He then analysed the activity of their genes, as measured by the production of asubstance called messenger RNA. This molecule carries instructions from the genes telling acell which proteins to make. The level of messenger RNA from most genes was the same in both types of people. There were several dozen genes, however, that were less active in the lonely, and several dozen others that were more active. Moreover, both the less active and the more active gene types came from a small number of functional groups.

　　加州大學洛杉磯分校的Steven Cole認為他可能知道這是為什么。他在華盛頓特區舉辦的美國科學促進會大會上展示了他對孤獨的人的基因表達所做的研究。Cole博士收集了孤獨之人和愛交際之人的白細胞樣品。然后他分析了他們基因的活性——靠測量信使RNA的多少。這種分子攜帶著基因上的指令，告訴細胞合成那類蛋白質。在這兩種人中，大多數基因的信使RNA的水平是一樣的。然而有些基因在孤獨之人中活力較弱，同時另外一些基因卻活力較高。而且，無論是活力較高的基因還是活力較低的基因都來自少數功能群。

　　Broadly speaking, the genes less active in the lonely were those involved in staving off viralinfections. Those that were more active were involved in protecting against bacteria. Dr Cole suspects this could help explain not only why the lonely are iller, but how, in evolutionaryterms, this odd state of affairs has come about. For inflammation is an antibacterial response.

　　一般來說，孤獨的人體內活力較低的基因是那些幫助人們避開病毒感染的基因。而那些活力較高的基因幫助人們抵抗細菌。Cole博士懷疑這不但能夠解釋為什么孤獨之人容易得病，而且能從進化的角度這種奇怪的狀態時怎么進化來的。因為炎癥反應時抵抗細菌的反應。

　　The crucial bit of the puzzle is that viruses have to be caught from another infected individual and they are usually species-specific. Bacteria, in contrast, often just lurk in theenvironment (like tetanus), and may thrive on many hosts (as does bubonic plague, for example). The gregarious are therefore at greater risk than the lonely of catching viruses, and Dr Cole thus suggests that past evolution has created a mechanism (the details of which remain unclear) which causes white cells to respond appropriately. Conversely, the lonely are better off ramping up their protection against bacterial infection, which is a bigger relative risk to them.

　　這個問題的關鍵點是，病毒必須從另外一個已經感染此病毒的身上感染另一個人，并且病毒通常有其一對一的特殊宿主。細菌卻相反，它們潛伏在周圍環境中(像是破傷風桿菌)，并且宿主眾多(比如說黑死病)。因而愛交際的人比孤獨之人更易感染病毒。因此Cole博士認為進化過程創造出了一種機制(細節仍不清楚)，可以讓白細胞對這一狀況進行反應。相反，孤獨之人更善于加強他們對細菌感染的保護反應，這對他們來說是一個相對更大的風險。

　　What Dr Cole seems to have revealed, then, is a mechanism by which the environment (in this case the social environment) reaches inside a person's body and tweaks its genome so that it responds appropriately. It is not that the lonely and the gregarious are genetically different from each other. Rather, their genes are regulated differently, according to how sociable an individual is. Dr Cole thinks this regulation is part of a wider mechanism that tunes individuals to the circumstances they find themselves in. Where it goes wrong is when loneliness becomeschronic, and the inflammatory response becomes chronic at the same time.

　　Cole博士想要揭示的是這樣一種機制：環境(在這里是社交環境)可以影響人們體內的生化活動，調整人體內的基因組以讓其做出合適的反應。并不是說孤獨之人和愛交際之人在基因上彼此不同。而是他們根據個人對交際喜愛的程度不同，各自以不同的方式調控各自的基因。Cole博士認為這種調節是一種更廣泛的讓個人適應他們所在環境的機制中的一部分。當孤獨的生活狀態變成一種常態，問題就出現了——炎癥反應同時也變成常態了(成了慢性疾病)。

　　Before civilisation intervened, such chronic loneliness would have been so rare (becauseisolated individuals are so vulnerable to predation) that evolution would have ignored it. Now,paradoxically, the large population that civilisation makes possible means loneliness iscommonplace—and with it consequences that natural selection, which is blind to the future, has not yet had time to deal with.

　　在文明到來之前，這種常態性的孤獨非常罕見(因為單獨的個體易被捕食)，進化就把它忽略了�，F在，自相矛盾地，文明使得人口眾多成為可能，意味著孤獨狀態成為常事——在這種情況下看不清未來的自然選擇的后果還來不及去應付。

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