Loneliness Sparks Risk of Dementia

Men and women who are living alone or got divorced are at a significant higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in later years of life, a Swedish study suggests.

The study, presented on Wednesday at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease (ICAD 2008) at McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois, suggests that middle-aged single people are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and other forms of age-related dementia than married ones or those with a partner.

The new research conducted by Krister Hakansson, a psychology researcher at the Vaxjo University and Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has found that those living alone in mid-life are 40 to 50 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer’s later in life.

Hakansson and colleagues reached their findings after studying the data from a Finnish study where 1449 people were examined at the age of around 50. All the participants, who were asked about their relationship status in mid-life, were re- examined 21 years later.

After re-visiting the study subjects 21years later, the researchers found that people who were widowed or never remarried or divorced were 50% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who were living with their spouses.

Hakansson’s team also discovered that some factors like how long a person lived alone and under what circumstances they did so affected their risk of developing dementia.

People who lived alone for their entire adult lives faced twice the risk for dementia while those who divorced in middle age and remained single had three times the risk of dementia, the researchers found.

The risk of dementia was higher for those who had lost their partner before middle age and then continued to live as a widow or widower. They faced six times greater risk of developing dementia than the married couples in the study.

"Living in a couple relationship is normally one of the most intense forms of social and intellectual stimulation. If social and cognitive challenges can protect against dementia, so should living as a couple,” said Hakansson.

"Living in couple means that you are confronted with other ideas, perspectives and needs. You have to compromise, make decisions and solve problems together with someone else, which is more complicated and challenging. It is probably easier to get stuck in your own habits and routines if you live by yourself," he added.

Alzheimer’s is mainly a neurological disorder that causes dementia in the elderly people and has so far been incurable. In this brain disorder, a person slowly and progressively starts loosing his memory due to gradual loss of brain cells. It is the most common form of dementia (loss of intellectual ability) and is the fourth leading cause of deaths in adults according to National Institute of Health (NIH).

Alzheimer's affects almost half of all patients with dementia. The most striking early symptom of Alzheimer’s is loss of short term memory. As the disorder progresses, cognitive injury extends to the domains of language (aphasia), skilled movements (apraxia), recognition (agnosia), and those functions (such as decision-making and planning) closely related to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.