Having an active social life around sixty would reduce the risk of falling into dementia later.
Having an active social life is good for your health. Many scientific studies have already proven it, especially for older people. And, according to new work in the journal PLOS Medicinebeing socially active in your 50s and 60s reduces the risk of falling into dementia later on.
To reach this somewhat surprising conclusion, researchers at University College London in the United Kingdom followed 10,000 people from 1985 to 2013. Every five years, participants were asked to answer a questionnaire on the frequency of their contact. social with friends and relatives. They were also given cognitive tests while the researchers inquired about established dementia diagnoses.
At the end of their research, they discovered that people who saw friends daily at the age of 60 were 12% less likely to develop dementia than those who socialized once every two months.
An active social life to develop a “cognitive reserve”
Because an active social life promotes the use of memory and language, which could help minimize the effects of dementia, explains Professor Gill Livingston, co-author of the study. “People who are socially engaged train their cognitive abilities like memory and language, which could help them develop cognitive reserve. If that doesn’t stop their brains from changing, this reserve could help people cope better the effects of aging and to delay any symptoms of dementia,” she adds. Furthermore, “spending time with friends may also benefit well-being along with being physically active, a factor that may also help reduce the risk of dementia.”
But the positive effects of an active social life on dementia can undoubtedly be observed “at any age” of life, note the researchers who admit some limits to their study. Indeed, the data analyzed did not include details on the quality of social contacts. In addition, cases of dementia could have been omitted if the participants had never gone to consult.
Still, “this finding could help develop strategies to reduce dementia risk, supporting the importance of fostering communities and finding ways to reduce isolation and loneliness,” concludes Dr Andrew Sommerlad, lead author of the study.
“The size of the study population”
If previous studies had already established a link between social contact and the risk of dementia, this study is the “most robust ever carried out” to support this theory, welcome the researchers. “Many other studies have shown that social isolation is a risk factor. The strength of this work lies in the size of the population studied and in the fact that the evaluation of social contacts was done well before the component. of cognitive evaluation. This makes the direction of causality much stronger”, comments to the Guardian Clive Ballard, professor of age-related disorders at the University of Exeter outside the study.
These results are all the more interesting since dementia is now a real global health issue. 50 million people are currently affected in the four corners of the globe and nearly 10 million new cases appear each year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO)making it a “public health priority” in 2017, it is one of the leading causes of disability and dependency among older people.
Indeed, this syndrome in which we observe an alteration of cognitive function, affects memory, reasoning, orientation, calculation, learning capacity, language or even judgment, which makes the daily life of patients extremely difficult.
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