A study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Aging & Mental Health, has found that loneliness can affect how well older adults remember things. The study tracked over 10,000 people in Europe for over seven years, finding that those who felt more lonely began with weaker memory, though it did not deteriorate faster than those who felt more socially connected.
This challenges that idea that loneliness directly accelerates cognitive decline or dementia, suggesting instead that it affects baseline brain performance. Feeling lonely could impact how well older adults remember things, but the study found that it did not appear to make memory decline happen faster over time.
At the beginning of the study, the participants who reported higher levels of loneliness scored lower on memory tests. But over the years, their memory declined at approximately the same rate as those who didn’t feel lonely.
The results are based on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and the long-term research involved 10,217 adults aged between 65 and 94 from a dozen European countries.
Loneliness is increasingly being considered a major public health concern, due to its association with lifespan, physical and mental health, and overall well-being. The results add evidence to the belief that it is linked to brain function in older adults, though it also suggest that it does not directly increase the risk of dementia.
Routine checks for how lonely someone is could be part of cognitive health assessments among adults.
The research team included experts from Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, the Clínica Universitaria de Navarra and Universitat de Valencia in Spain, and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. They suggest that tackling isolation could be one of a number of methods to support better health in aging.
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