As society continues to grapple with the public health issue of loneliness, researchers have recently found a “surprising” outcome after studying the way loneliness could affect memory in older adults. While loneliness may have a significant impact on memory, it might not affect how fast memory declines over time, according to a study published in the Aging and Mental Health journal last week.
In a longitudinal analysis, researchers evaluated a total of 10,217 participants aged 65 and older from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE) from 12 countries over six years. Researchers sought to investigate how loneliness impacted memory in older adults.
The participants self-reported whether they experienced high loneliness, average loneliness or low loneliness at the study’s outset; none of the participants initially had a history of cognitive decline. Researchers found that participants who reported high loneliness had a significantly lower initial performance when their memories were assessed, compared to those who reported average or low loneliness. Reporting high loneliness, however, did not speed up their rate of decline in memory scores over time.
Dr. Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria, the lead author of the study from Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, said that the outcome of the study was “surprising.”
