Follow for more talkers

Loneliness can increase risk of dementia: study

By providing more social support and placing more preventative measures to prevent loneliness, people could avoid an ADRD diagnosis.

Avatar photo

Published

on
(Hermes Rivera via Unsplash)

By Alice Clifford via SWNS

Loneliness can increase the risk of dementia, a new study suggests.

Risk factors of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) include smoking, excessive drinking, poor sleep and a lack of frequent exercise.

Researchers found that people with these habits had greater odds of being lonely and lacking social support.

While ADRDs can be caused by many unchangeable things, such as genetics, the study offers an easier way to reduce the risk of these neurological conditions.

By providing more social support and placing more preventative measures to prevent loneliness, people could avoid an ADRD diagnosis.

Researchers studied the data of 502,506 UK Biobank participants and 30,097 people in the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging.

Both studies asked participants about loneliness, frequency of social interaction and social support.

(Karolina Grabowska via Pexels)

In the Canadian study, increased regular participation in physical exercise with other people was associated with a 20.1 percent decrease in the odds of feeling lonely and a 26.9 percent decrease in having poor social support.

Physical and mental health factors previously linked to ADRD, such as cardiovascular disease, vision or hearing impairment, diabetes and neurotic and depressive behaviors, were also associated with social isolation.

The UK data showed that difficulty to hear when surrounded by background noise led to a 29 percent increase in the odds of feeling lonely.

People struggling to hear also saw a 9.86 percent increase in the odds of lacking social support.

The probability of feeling lonely and feeling unsupported was 3.7 and 1.4 times greater, respectively, as a function of a participant’s score for neuroticism.

Neuroticism is a personality trait used to describe someone who feels anxious, depressed and other negative feelings.

ADRDs are a growing public health crisis, with an annual global cost of more than $1 trillion US.

Kimia Shafighi, from McGill University, Canada, and lead author, said: “Given the uncertain impact of social distancing measures imposed by COVID-19, our findings underscore the importance of investigating the multiscale effect of social isolation to inform public health interventions for ADRD.”

This study was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Stories and infographics by ‘Talker Research’ are available to download & ready to use. Stories and videos by ‘Talker News’ are managed by SWNS. To license content for editorial or commercial use and to see the full scope of SWNS content, please email [email protected] or submit an inquiry via our contact form.

Top Talkers