In 1966, The Beatles cemented the plight of lonely older people in the popular imagination with “Eleanor Rigby,” a song that turned pop music on its head when it stayed at No. 1 on the British charts for four weeks. Today, the impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy has been categorically quantified for the first time in a study by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore), Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and their collaborators, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.