Overview
- The peer-reviewed analysis, published Tuesday in Aging & Mental Health, followed 10,217 adults across 12 European countries for seven years using SHARE and excluded anyone with dementia or impaired daily living.
- People who felt very lonely started with lower scores on immediate and delayed word‑recall tests, yet their memory faded at the same pace as peers with low or average loneliness.
- Loneliness was measured with three questions about lacking companionship, feeling left out, and feeling isolated, and 8% fell into the high‑loneliness group.
- Those with high loneliness were older, more often women, and reported poorer health, depression, high blood pressure, and diabetes.
- Researchers recommend routine screening for loneliness in cognitive assessments and note a key limit that they treated loneliness as fixed, which tempers claims about cause and dementia risk.