A Cambridge psychiatrist who’s an expert on loneliness says he welcomes the United Kingdom’s appointment of a new minister of loneliness — and the United States needs to pay attention to the issue, too.

“I think it’s a very important development in beginning to approach loneliness and social isolation as essentially a public health problem, which they really are,’’ Dr. Richard S. Schwartz said. Schwartz and his wife, Dr. Jacqueline Olds, wrote “The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century.’’

“They’re conditions that have incredibly powerful medical effects,’’ he said.

Research has found that socially isolated people are much more likely to die in a given period than their socially connected neighbors. Loneliness has also been linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, and to the progression of Alzheimer’s.

Former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy has been speaking out about the importance of emotional well-being and the toll of loneliness. The data are “telling us that loneliness kills,’’ Murthy told the Globe in a recent interview.

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain appointed a minister for loneliness Wednesday, calling it a “sad reality of modern life.’’

May said in a speech that officials had “started work on an England-wide strategy to tackle loneliness.’’

She also said that in her country of 60 million, more than 9 million people say they often, or always, feel lonely.

May announced that Tracey Crouch, undersecretary of sport and civil society in the culture ministry, would lead the campaign. May also said the Office of National Statistics would measure loneliness, and a new fund would be created to look for innovative solutions, provide seed funding for community projects, and scale up existing ones.

“Britain has been sort of ahead of the curve on this for a while, taking it much more seriously,’’ Schwartz said. “They have been trying on a larger scale to address this as a big social problem in a way that we haven’t yet done here.’’

He pointed, for example, to Britain’s Silver Line, a free help line founded in 2012 for older people, that, among other things, serves as “a befriending service to combat loneliness.’’

He said government involvement in combating the loneliness epidemic “opens up new possibilities’’ to combat the problem in both the elderly and children.

Material from Globe wire services was used in this report.