Younger American men lonelier than counterparts in other nations: Gallup
A new study suggests young American men are lonelier than their counterparts in other nations.
One in four U.S. men under age 35 report feeling lonely, according to compiled data released Tuesday by Gallup. Overall, 25 percent of men in the U.S. said they experience bouts of loneliness in the day prior to completing the survey.
The number was 10 percentage points higher than their counterparts in 38 mostly higher-income, democratic countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).
The median for OECD respondents in the 15-35 age bracket was 15 percent respectively.
Comparatively, the U.S. men felt loneliness at 7 percentage points higher than the responses recorded by U.S. women in the same age bracket.
However, statistics show at least one in five younger men across the world say they feel lonely.
Respondents in Turkey ranked the highest for feelings related to emotional isolation at 29 percent, followed by France at 24 percent, Ireland at 23 percent and Canada 22 percent.
While 20 percent of young men in Luxembourg, Australia and New Zealand said they feel lonely during large portions of the day.
Gallup based their findings on aggregated data from 2023 and 2024.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
WebMD
35 minutes ago
- WebMD
FDA Approves New 3-in-1 Combo Pill for High Blood Pressure
June 11, 2025 – The FDA has approved a new pill for adults with high blood pressure (hypertension) that combines three medicines in one. Available in one regular and two lower doses, it offers a convenient option for treating hypertension, which affects nearly half of the adults in the U.S. and raises their risk of stroke and heart failure. Sold as Widaplik, it is the first and only single pill to combine three previously FDA-approved drugs – telmisartan, amlodipine, and indapamide – offering a triple-action approach for people who would otherwise need multiple pills to manage their blood pressure. It works in three ways and is a safe, well-tolerated early treatment option. Hypertension happens when your blood pushes too hard against your blood vessels, making the heart work harder and increasing the risk of heart problems, strokes, and other complications. It contributes to about 460,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and often goes undetected due to a lack of symptoms. With 1 in 3 Americans unaware they have it and only 1 in 4 managing it well, there's an urgent need for simpler, more effective treatments. The approval was based on two large studies that showed using Widaplik helped lower blood pressure more than using just two medicines or a placebo, according to a news release from the company that makes it, George Medicines. People who took Widaplik didn't stop taking it more often because of side effects, which means it was generally easy for them to take. Another trial showed that Widaplik was better at reducing blood pressure compared to standard care, while remaining well-tolerated. George Medicines stated that a global trial is underway to find out if the combo treatment can help prevent strokes in people who have previously had an intracerebral hemorrhage (sudden bleeding in the brain), the most serious type of stroke. "Single-pill combination antihypertensive therapy has great potential to improve hypertension control in the US and worldwide. Most patients with hypertension need multiple therapies to achieve their blood pressure goals. The new dose options available with Widaplik offer a treatment regimen that could benefit a broad range of patients, including those just starting treatment," Paul Whelton, MD, Show Chwan chair of global public health at Tulane University in New Orleans and past president of the World Hypertension League, said in a statement. Widaplik is a medicine made of three drugs that work together to help lower blood pressure. Two of them, telmisartan and amlodipine, relax blood vessels so blood can flow more easily. The third, indapamide, helps your body get rid of extra water by making you pee more. Widaplik comes in three strengths: 10/1.25/0.625 mg, 20/2.5/1.25 mg, and 40/5/2.5 mg. Low blood pressure – which can make you feel faint or dizzy – was the most common side effect, the company said. Patients who pass out should stop taking the medication and consult their doctor.
Chicago Tribune
38 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
New paper sheds light on experience of Black prisoners in infamous Stateville prison malaria experiments
Much has been said and written over the years about controversial malaria research conducted on inmates at Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary starting in the 1940s. But at least one part of that story has been largely ignored until now: the role of Black prisoners in that research, which helped lead to the modern practice of using genetic testing to understand how individual patients will react to certain medications, according to the authors of a newly published paper out of the University of Utah. 'We want to highlight the stories of Black prisoners that participated in this prison research in the 1950s onward and give them their due,' said Hannah Allen, a medical ethicist and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and first author of the paper, which was published as an opinion piece Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 'They haven't been properly acknowledged in the past, and their participation in these studies was really foundational in launching the field of pharmacogenetics and, later on, precision medicine,' said Allen, who recently completed her doctorate at the University of Utah. Starting in the 1940s, researchers infected inmates at the Joliet-area prison with malaria to test the effectiveness of drugs to treat the illness as part of a U.S. military-funded effort to protect American troops overseas, according to the paper. A University of Chicago doctor was the principal investigator. The inmates consented to being part of the studies and were paid for their participation. At first, the research was greeted with enthusiasm. In 1945, Life magazine ran a spread about it, featuring a photo of a Stateville inmate with cups containing malaria-carrying mosquitoes pressed against his bare chest. The first line of the story reads, 'In three U.S. penitentiaries men who have been imprisoned as enemies of society are now helping science fight another enemy of society.' But as the years passed, attitudes began to shift. Questions arose about whether inmates could truly, freely consent to participate in medical experiments or whether they felt coerced into them because of their often dire circumstances. At the Nuremberg trials, defense attorneys for Nazi doctors introduced text and images from the Life article about Stateville prison, though an Illinois physician argued at the trials that the prisoners in Stateville consented to being part of medical research whereas Nazi prisoners did not, according to the JAMA paper. In the mid-1970s, news broke about a study at Tuskegee, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated for years — news that raised awareness of ethical problems in medical research. News outlets also began publishing more stories about prison research, according to the JAMA article. The Chicago Tribune published an article in 1973, in which an inmate participating in the Stateville malaria research said: 'I've been coerced into the project — for the money. Being here has nothing to do with 'doing good for mankind' … I didn't want to keep taking money from my family.' The experiments at Stateville came to a halt in the 1970s. A number of protections and regulations are now in place when it comes to research involving prisoners. Since the 1970s, the Stateville research has often been discussed and analyzed but little attention has been paid to its Black participants, said James Tabery, a medical ethicist and philosophy professor at the University of Utah who led the new research, which was funded by the federal National Institutes of Health. For a time, Black prisoners were excluded from the studies because of a myth that Black people were immune to malaria, Tabery said. Later on, once scientists had pinpointed the drug primaquine as an effective medication for malaria, they turned their attention to the question of why 5% to 10% of Black men experienced a violent reaction to the drug, according to the paper. Ultimately, the scientists were successful, finding that the adverse reaction was related to a specific genetic deficiency. 'There are people all over Chicago today that are getting tested, that clinicians are recommending they get a genetic test before they get prescribed a drug because they want to make sure that their patient isn't going to have an adverse reaction to the drug,' Tabery said. 'It's really sort of powerful and interesting that you can trace that approach to doing good clinical medicine right back to this particular moment and place and population.' But Tabery and Allen also found that the Black prisoners were not treated the same as the white prisoners who participated in research at Stateville. For one, they weren't paid as much as the white prisoners, the rationale being that the white prisoners were infected with malaria, whereas the Black prisoners were given the drug but not infected with the disease — though some of the Black prisoners got very ill after taking the medication, according to the paper. Also, researchers didn't protect the Black participants' privacy as well as they did for other participants. They published certain identifying information about the Black participants, such as initials, ages, heights and weights, whereas participants in the previous research were represented with case numbers, according to the paper. Researchers also recruited the Black prisoners' family members for the study, which they didn't do with earlier participants, according to the paper. 'You see them just doing things with the Black prisoners that they're not doing with the white prisoners,' Tabery said. Also, though scientists made an important discovery through the research on Black prisoners, the episode also highlights the difficulty that can occur in translating discoveries into real life help for patients. Though the World Health Organization now recommends genetic testing to protect people who are sensitive to antimalarials, many of the people who would benefit most from such testing still don't receive it because of financial barriers, supply chain issues and a lack of training, according to the paper. 'What we found is when you sort of shift to what was happening to the Black prisoners, these other lessons you hadn't thought of as being derivable from Stateville suddenly do become apparent,' Tabery said.
USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Unpacking RFK's lengthy social media post after firing vaccine committee members
Unpacking RFK's lengthy social media post after firing vaccine committee members Show Caption Hide Caption RFK Jr. expels entire CDC vaccine advisory committee Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. removed a 17-member panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that issues recommendations on vaccines. unbranded - Newsworthy A day after abruptly firing the entire committee that advises the federal government on vaccine safety, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would reconstitute it with 'highly credentialed physicians and scientists' amid backlash from his detractors about the terminations. In a long post on X on June 10, Kennedy criticized the process by which the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices recommends new vaccines, implying that "adequate safety trials" were not being conducted before recommending new vaccines to children, a notion that was strongly disputed by vaccine experts. Kennedy, who has a long record of promoting anti-vaccine views, also said the new Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices will have no 'ideological anti-vaxxers' but that the committee will apply 'evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.' 'The most outrageous example of ACIP's malevolent malpractice has been its stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children,' he wrote. Kennedy said a compliant American child receives more shots now from conception to 18 years of age compared to 1986, none of which required placebo-controlled trials. That was the year when the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was set up, protecting vaccine makers from liability and establishing a federal program to compensate individuals injured by certain vaccines. 'This means that no one can scientifically ascertain whether these products are averting more problems than they are causing,' he wrote. A placebo-controlled study is a type of clinical trial where one group of participants receives an active treatment, while another group receives an inactive substance, helping researchers to determine whether the active treatment is truly effective. But conducting placebo-controlled studies on vaccines that are improvements on existing vaccines presents ethical and practical challenges, say vaccine experts. 'If a vaccine for a serious disease (e.g., measles, polio) already exists and is proven effective, giving participants a placebo instead of the vaccine could expose them to preventable harm or death,' wrote Dr. Jerome Adams, the former U.S. Surgeon General under President Trump's first term, in a June 9 post on X. How do vaccines work? Medical experts explain. New vaccines always undergo a placebo-controlled study, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. But Kennedy's definition of placebo is different from FDA's, said Offit. Kennedy has sought to narrowly define placebos as salt water, said Offit, while the FDA defines it as an 'inactive substance.' 'A placebo may contain sodium sulfate or potassium sulfate or may contain sucrose, or it may contain an emulsifier – those are all generally regarded as safe,' said Offit. 'He doesn't regard them as safe.' HHS did not respond to USA TODAY seeking a comment on how Kennedy's definition differs from that of the FDA. Offit said Kennedy is a lawyer who has spent years suing pharmaceutical companies, and 'his job is to scare people about vaccines ultimately, so he can bring them back to court and sue companies,' he said. Meanwhile, in his announcement of the removal of the 17 members of the ACIP committee Kennedy said the purpose was to insulate the committee from 'conflicts of interest.'
