Abstract
BackgroundLoneliness is most prevalent during adolescence and late life and has been associated with mental health disorders as well as with cognitive decline during aging. Associations between longitudinal measures of loneliness and verbal episodic memory and brain structure should thus be investigated.MethodsWe sought to determine associations between loneliness and verbal episodic memory as well as loneliness and hippocampal volume trajectories across three longitudinal cohorts within the Lifebrain Consortium, including children, adolescents (N = 69, age range 10–15 at baseline examination) and older adults (N = 1468 over 60). We also explored putative loneliness correlates of cortical thinning across the entire cortical mantle.ResultsLoneliness was associated with worsening of verbal episodic memory in one cohort of older adults. Specifically, reporting medium to high levels of loneliness over time was related to significantly increased memory loss at follow-up examinations. The significance of the loneliness-memory change association was lost when eight participants were excluded after having developed dementia in any of the subsequent follow-up assessments. No significant structural brain correlates of loneliness were found, neither hippocampal volume change nor cortical thinning.ConclusionIn the present longitudinal European multicenter study, the association between loneliness and episodic memory was mainly driven by individuals exhibiting progressive cognitive decline, which reinforces previous findings associating loneliness with cognitive impairment and dementia.
Highlights
Loneliness is a subjective and negative emotion related to dissatisfaction with the quantity or quality of social connections (Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2010)
Significant associations between age and loneliness were observed within the German (BASE-II) cohort, with older participants reporting increased feelings of loneliness; a result that is in line with the acknowledged increase of loneliness in late life, a period where one may experience a number of losses, from the death of a spouse or friends to social disengagement (Singh and Misra, 2009)
It has been recently argued that loneliness is more associated with health, functional limitations and depression (Jarach et al, 2021), than with social isolation itself, and we have not controlled for physical health variables in the present study, neither have we taken into account other generational factors, which may have contributed to the abovementioned associations found in BASE-II
Summary
Loneliness is a subjective and negative emotion related to dissatisfaction with the quantity or quality of social connections (Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2010). Loneliness and social isolation are related, with the latter describing an objective state of minimal social contact or even lack of social support (Ong et al, 2016; Yanguas et al, 2018), both entities represent independent risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia with advanced age (Holwerda et al, 2014; Kuiper et al, 2015; Sundström et al, 2020; Sutin et al, 2020). Associations between greater loneliness and lower cognitive functioning have been found in cross-sectional studies with advanced age (reviewed in Boss et al, 2015), as well as in a previous longitudinal study with repeated measures of loneliness and cognition (Wilson et al, 2007). Associations between longitudinal measures of loneliness and verbal episodic memory and brain structure should be investigated
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