A study has found people who socialised more with friends at the age of 60 were less likely to develop dementia later in life. We look behind the headlines.
News reports claimed that socialising every day in midlife could help protect against dementia, although it is not clear whether the link could be due to other factors.
The Research
Researchers at University College London used information from over 10,000 people who answered questions about their social contact with friends and family between 1985 and 2013. People in the study also completed five cognitive tests between 1997 and 2016, assessing their verbal memory, verbal fluency, and reasoning. Their health records were used to find out whether they went on to develop dementia.
The study did not distinguish between the types of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease (the most common type) or vascular dementia (the second most common type). Vascular dementia is caused by reduced blood supply to the brain, usually as a result of narrowed blood vessels, a stroke or a series of mini-strokes (TIA’s).
The participants were taking part in the Whitehall II study, part-funded by the BHF, which followed the health of London civil servants from the mid-1980s until 2017.
The researchers found that people who regularly socialised with friends at the age of 60 had a lower risk of developing dementia, but socialising with relatives wasn’t linked to a difference in risk.
When they studied social contact at the ages of 50 and 70, the researchers found lower risks of dementia in people who socialised more, however these findings were not strong enough to be statistically significant.
How good was the research?
A strength of the study is that people answered detailed questions on six occasions over 18 years about their social contact, including how regularly they saw family, friends or acquaintances.
Read more on Heart Matters