Smokers report higher levels of loneliness than non-smokers, and their loneliness climbs faster over time, according to new findings from more than 50,000 older adults across 15 European countries.
The results were presented at the European Respiratory Society Congress in Barcelona in September 2026.
The study directly challenges a cultural idea that has followed cigarettes for decades.
The team behind the work argues that the social image of smoking, the shared lighter, the smoke break outside the office, does not match what the data actually shows.
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"Smoking is not social; our research shows it leads to increased social isolation and loneliness," said Dr. Keir Philip, clinical lecturer at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, who led the analysis.
What the researchers looked at
The team drew on the Survey of Health and Ageing in Europe (SHARE), a long-running dataset that follows adults aged around 50 and older across the continent.
The analysis included more than 50,000 participants with an average age of 67 years.
At the start, 22 percent were current smokers and 48.5 percent lived with more than two chronic conditions.
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Loneliness was measured with the UCLA loneliness scale, a widely used research tool that asks how often a person feels a lack of companionship, feels left out, and feels isolated from others.
Participants were assessed at baseline and again roughly two years later.
Current smokers scored higher on loneliness than non-smokers at the outset.
Over the two-year window, they also showed larger increases in loneliness than non-smokers, even after the researchers adjusted for age, sex, demographics, and initial loneliness scores.
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The pattern was consistent across European regions.
Why smoking may push people apart
The study is observational, so it cannot prove that smoking directly causes loneliness.
It shows a robust association in a very large sample. The authors point to two plausible mechanisms.
Long-term smoking is a leading cause of progressive lung, heart, and vascular disease, and those illnesses limit mobility, energy, and the ability to take part in social activities.
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Rules against indoor smoking in workplaces, restaurants, and increasingly in homes also cut down on time spent with others.
The findings echo an earlier Imperial College London analysis published in The Lancet Regional Health, Europe in January 2022, which tracked 8,780 adults in England for 12 years and reported that smokers became more socially isolated and lonely than non-smokers over time.
The mental-health picture
Broader research has already linked smoking to worse mental health.
Mendelian randomization studies, which use genetic variants to probe causation, have supported the idea that smoking increases the risk of depression rather than simply being a consequence of it.
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Meta-analyses have also found that people who quit smoking report reductions in depression, anxiety, and stress compared with those who continue.
Loneliness itself carries a heavy health load, with links to cardiovascular disease, weakened immune function, and cognitive decline, as covered in our earlier reporting on what chronic loneliness does to the body.
Professor Des Cox of University College Dublin, who sits on the European Respiratory Society's Advocacy Council and was not involved in the study, said the results should shape how the smoking conversation is framed, especially for younger people who take up cigarettes for social reasons.
This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.