Research by the Rush Memory and Aging Project shows that older adults participate in more social activities up to five years later develop dementia than those who are less socially active, which emphasizes the power of social connections in brain health.
Study: Social activity in late life and the subsequent risk of dementia and mild cognitive disorders. Image Credit: Bbernard/Shutterstock.com
Published in a recent study in Alzheimer and dementiaResearchers investigated the relationship between social activity with the risk of mild cognitive disorders (MCI) and dementia.
Background
An estimated 50 million adults are hit worldwide by dementia, with annual worldwide spending on dementia $ 263 billion.
As such, strategies to postpone or prevent dementia are first. Some evidence suggests that social involvement is linked to a reduced risk of dementia and less cognitive decline, and can therefore be a potential way to prevent dementia.
Social involvement is a multidimensional construct that includes various but mutually interconnected domains, such as subjective psychosocial experience (loneliness), functional aspects (social support) and structural elements (civil status, social activity).
Social activity is a robust and consistent risk factor for cognitive health and it can be more susceptible to intervention at population level than others.
About the study
In the current study, researchers investigated the associations between social activity and incident MCI and dementia. Participants of the Rush Memory and Aging Project, a longitudinal clinical-pathological study that was founded in 1997, were analyzed.
They were recruited in the metropolitan area of Chicago, and so far around 2,300 older adults have completed the basic evaluation.
Social activity levels were estimated as a participation frequency in six common social activities. Topics assessed how often they took the following activities in the past year: 1) Group participation, 2) to sporting events, restaurants or off-track gambling, 3) Visits of friends or family members, 4) Attend religious services, 5) day or overnight stays, go, and 6) Doing unpaid volunteer or community work.
Tisp persons underwent a clinical diagnostic procedure for annual evaluations. A 21 cognitive tests battery was scored.
A neuropsychologist gave a clinical opinion about the presence of cognitive disorders based on the test score. Subsequently, a doctor made a diagnostic classification of dementia after assessing cognitive tests, medical history and neurological research.
Participants were classified to have MCI if they had a neuropsychologist who had a disorders that did not meet the diagnostic criteria for dementia. Subjects without dementia or MCI were classified as no cognitive disorders.
The associations between social activity levels and time to incident MCI or dementia were investigated with the help of multivariable Cox proportional danger models. In addition, age in dementia/MCI diagnosis was estimated at the level of social activity.
Findings
In general, 1,923 participants, with an average age of 80.4 years, were admitted for the analyzes. They were followed for an average of 6.7 years, with 36% and 28% MCI and dementia developing respectively.
The average score for social activities was 2.6, which reflects a participation frequency of several times a month. Participants had about seven social contacts that they had seen at least once a month.
A unit increase of the social activity score was associated with a reduced risk of dementia of 38% after correction for gender, age, education, civil status and race/ethnicity.
To assess whether social activity was independently associated with incident dementia, other variables of social involvement, for example loneliness, social network size and social support, were included in the model.
The recording of additional variables yielded similar associations between social activity and dementia. Moreover, there was a significant link between loneliness and incident dementia, in which a unit increase in loneliness was associated with an increased risk of 40%. Social support and network size were not related to incident dementia.
The least socially active participants had a considerably lower chance of staying dementia -free than the most socially active.
Furthermore, social activity was strongly associated with the age in the diagnosis of dementia; The predicted average age at the start of dementia was 87.7 years for the least socially active and 92.2 years for the most socially active.
In addition, social activity was associated with a lower risk of MCI after correction for sex, education, civil status, ethnicity/race and age.
A unit increase of the score for social activities was associated with a reduced MCI risk of 21%. Furthermore, the predicted average age at the start of MCI was 74.2 and 79.1 years for the least and most socially active participants respectively.
Conclusions
In short, the findings indicate that larger social activity levels were associated with an older age of five years at the start of dementia compared to the least socially active participants.
Similarly, there was a difference of five years between the age of MCI between the most and least socially active individuals. These results underline the value of social activity as a possible intervention at community level to reduce dementia.