Does Loneliness Cause Dementia?

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While you may have heard that living alone doesn’t necessarily make you lonely, a new research study reported on by CNN indicates that only about one in five elderly persons who live alone are lonely and that loneliness was associated with memory loss. So, living alone is not necessarily problematic for the elderly, however being lonely can present a serious impediment to quality living.

Tjalling Jan Holwerda, lead researcher from the Free University Medical Center in Amsterdam, studied over 2,000 persons over 65-years old, who were living in the Netherlands, for this research. None of the study participants showed any signs of dementia at the beginning of the research, and none were in assisted living circumstances. Holwerda’s team studied the cohort longitudinally, following up with them twice yearly over a three year period. Even when results were adjusted for demographics such as age, lonely people in her study were 64 percent more likely to be to manifest symptoms of dementia.

Study Corroborates Previous Findings

Holwerda’s research builds on the results of previous studies that found that having a supportive social network was correlated with factors such as good psychological and physical well-being. Some of this research suggests being lonely can be lethal — as this risk factor was correlated with higher blood pressure and increased risk for heart disease and stroke.

Holwerda’s research replicates a 2007 study conducted in the US that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In this study, 823 elderly persons free of dementia were recruited from senior citizen facilities in the Chicago, Illinois area. Each research subject was asked to rate his perceived loneliness on a scale of 1 to 5, once at baseline and once a year over the next four years. After research subjects passed away, a postmortem was conducted to quantify Alzheimers/Dementia pathology in their brains. In total, 76 subjects had some clinical evidence of AD, with lonely people being about twice as likely to manifest these signs. As in Holwerda’s research, it was the subjective experience of loneliness, not being socially isolated, that was associated with a higher incidence of AD.

The Power of Perception

Caution is warranted when reviewing research results reporting a correlational relationship between factors, because, as any first year statistics student will tell you, correlation does not imply causation. Just because loneliness is associated with depression, does not mean that loneliness causes dementia. In fact, persons with dementia may separate themselves from others, or a third factor, such as poor social skills, may account for both loneliness and dementia.

In any event, this study provides convincing evidence of the power of perception. That a person’s belief that they are lonely is related to the likelihood that they will show some signs of dementia over time is an amazing, important outcome of this research.