Mental Health and Social Isolation

Mental Health | Social Isolation linked with higher risk of incident Dementia in US older adults

Social isolation appears common in community-dwelling older adults in the United States and is associated with an increased risk of developing dementia over 9 years, according to study results published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

“Moving forward, from clinical and intervention perspectives, screening for social isolation in clinical settings may be valuable for maintaining health and mental health,” wrote corresponding author Thomas K. M. Cudjoe MD, MPH, and coauthors from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “Social isolation is also potentially modifiable and may be an additional focus for dementia prevention interventions.”

The study used data for 5022 Medicare beneficiaries from the National Health and Aging Trends Study. Researchers used a composite measure of social isolation to classify older adults as being socially isolated or not.

Some 1172, or 23.3% of the 5022 older adults in the study, were deemed socially isolated. Being socially isolated was associated with a 1.28 higher hazard of incident dementia over 9 years compared with not being socially isolated, after adjusting for demographic and health factors. 

The association did not vary significantly by race or ethnicity.

“This study is the first, to our knowledge, to examine the longitudinal association between social isolation and incident dementia in a nationally representative sample of US older adults,” authors noted.
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