Living with others, weekly community group engagement and interaction with family and friends, and never feeling lonely are associated with slower cognitive decline, according to the results of a new study.
Researchers from the Center for Healthy Brain Aging at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, looked at the association between various social connection markers and their links to reducing cognitive decline and dementia. Although the research did not look specifically at senior living communities, the data make the case for the setting’s social structure in slowing rates of cognitive decline.
The research involved 40,000 people across 13 international studies on six continents — North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia — that were part of the Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium, or COSMIC.
“We found that sharing a home with one or more person(s) and weekly community group engagement had the most robust results across studies, indicating these factors are fundamental components in the link with less cognitive decline,” Henry Brodaty, study co-author and co-director of the center, said in a statement.
Social support, relationships satisfaction and the existence of a confidante were found not to have a significant effect on cognition levels.
Perminder Sachdev, COSMIC Consortium lead professor, said that “having researchers of brain aging from around the world come together in this collaboration to determine what factors of social connection are common for memory decline will have significant impact on policy change for the future of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.”
The study was published recently in The Lancet Healthy Longevity and was supported by an EU Joint Programme-Neurodegenerative Disease Research grant funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council Australia and the US National Institute on Aging.
