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Social isolation is directly linked to changes in brain structures associated with memory, making it a clear risk factor for dementia, researchers from the University of Warwick, Cambridge University and Fudan University have found ( United Kingdom) after investigating the relationship between loneliness and subsequent dementia using neuroimaging data from more than 30,000 participants from the UK Biobank.
The results, which appear in «Neurology»show that socially isolated individuals had a lower volume of gray matter in brain regions related to memory and learning.
Based on these data from UK Biobankand after adjusting for various risk factors (including socioeconomic factors, chronic disease, lifestyle, depression, and APOE genotype), socially isolated individuals were shown to be 26% more likely to develop dementia.
The soledad it was also associated with later dementia, but this relationship was not significant after adjusting for the depression factor, which explained 75% of the relationship between loneliness and dementia. Therefore, relative to the subjective feeling of loneliness, objective social isolation is an independent risk factor for later dementia. Further subgroup analyzes showed that the effect was prominent in older than 60 years.
“There is a difference between social isolation, which is an objective state of poor social connections, and loneliness, which is subjectively perceived social isolation,” says Edmund Rolls, a neuroscientist in the Department of Informatics at the University of Warwick.
“Both -he continues- have health risks”, but, using in this study “we have been able to demonstrate that it is social isolation, and not the feeling of loneliness, which constitutes an independent risk factor for later dementia. This means it can be used as a predictor or biomarker for dementia.”
“With the increasing prevalence of social isolation and loneliness in recent decades, this has been a serious but underappreciated public health problem. Now, in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are implications for interventions in social relationships and care, especially in the elderly population.”
For Jianfeng Feng, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, the results are relevant because “we highlight the importance of an environmental method to reduce the risk of dementia in older adults by ensuring that they are not socially isolated. During any future pandemic shutdowns, it is important that individuals, especially older adults, do not experience social isolation.”
In this sense, “now that we know the risk that social isolation poses for brain health and dementia, it is important that governments and communities take steps to ensure that older people have communication and interaction with other people on a regular basis.
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