Scientists reveal surprising link between social factors and cognition

Are you anti-social? Do you prefer staying at home avoiding human interactions? Well, new research says there might be a link between cognitive health and social factors in aging adults.

Research by an interdisciplinary team from McGill University and Université Laval provides new insights into this.

While previous research had found positive correlations between specific measures of social connections and a variety of health outcomes, this study appears to have been the first to create profiles including multiple social factors and to see how those correlated with cognitive health in older adults.

The team divided people into three social environment categories (weaker, intermediate and richer) by assembling 24 social variables – reflecting elements such as network size, social support, social cohesion and social isolation – using data from approximately 30,000 participants, aged 45-85, in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA).

For cognition, the researchers examined three domains: executive function, episodic memory and prospective memory, using data from a battery of tests previously administered to CLSA participants.

Associate Professor at the McGill School of Human Nutrition and co-first author of the paper, Daiva Nielsen, stated, "We identified significant associations between the social profiles and all three cognitive domains, with the intermediate and richer profiles generally exhibiting better cognitive outcomes than the weaker profile.”

The researcher noted that the effect size of the associations (a statistical measure to calculate the strength of the relationship between variables) was, however, relatively small.

Nielsen noted that the effect sizes were somewhat stronger for participants who were 65 or older, hence, social environment-cognition association may be more significant in later stages of life.

"Lack of social connection has been shown to be comparable to more widely acknowledged disease risk factors such as smoking, physical inactivity and obesity. It is important to translate this knowledge to the public to empower individuals to help build meaningful connections within their communities," she added.

"This work is an excellent example of the benefits of multidisciplinary research teams that can tackle complex research questions and bring diverse knowledge and expertise," Daiva Nielsen concluded.