What's one of the leading causes of premature death in the Western world?

Loneliness.

And whom does loneliness kill?

Who does it not? For every citizen in every one of the world's technologically advanced nations--from homemakers to businesspeople, from college students to school dropouts, from the elderly to the young--loneliness is an unrecognized, unguarded-against stalker.

Though it's never cited as the cause of death on a standard death certificate, loneliness, like communicable diseases of old, comes like a thief in the night to claim its victims. While medical science continues to focus on communicable disease, Dr. James Lynch has devoted his career to elucidating a new but equally potent cause of disease and premature death--communicative dis-ease--and to explaining its widespread but little-comprehended medical consequences. In 1977 Lynch became the first to document how loneliness contributed to all forms of premature death, especially from heart disease. His much-publicized and oft-cited best seller, The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness, caused a social and medical stir both wide and deep and was translated into 10 languages.

Determined now to show how loneliness has festered and grown into a silent epidemic, and drawing on a lifetime of his own original medical research, he makes a number of provocative charges and predictions in his new groundbreaking sequel, A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness.