Centenarians less lonely than others aged 65 and over: study

CENTENARIANS are less lonely than other elderly people, a University of Otago study has found.

The findings were drawn from the responses of more than 70,000 people through the Residential AssessmentInstrument Home Care.

The study found a 32% reduction in loneliness for people older than 100 compared with the rest of the ‘‘elderly’’ people studied — those aged 65 to 99.

Dunedin School of Medicine clinical training fellow Dr Sharon Leitch, who led the research, said loneliness decreased from the age of 65 to 75, plateauing at 75, and then started to decrease again at 95.

She described the findings as ‘‘surprising’’.

‘‘Other international literature published about centenarians typically describes increasing loneliness with age,’’ she said.

‘‘Our participants were all living in the community rather than in residential care or hospital care, which may explain why they felt less depressed.’’

One in three of the centenarians also lived with family — and all of those factors were likely to contribute to lower rates of loneliness, Dr Leitch said.

Dr Leitch carried out the research along with fellow University of Otago academics Prof Paul Glue, Andrew Gray, Philippa Greco and Associate Prof Yoran Barak.

Human connections were ‘‘vital for our wellbeing’’, Dr Leitch said.

While the study only looked at ‘‘psychosocial variables’’, previous research had shown loneliness was associated with a reduced quality of life, morbidity, and mortality, and related to a wide range of conditions, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and insomnia.

Dr Leitch said her research team was reexamining the data to tease out the relationships between loneliness, sensory impairment and cognitive impairment, in the hope of identifying factors that could be modified to reduce the chance of developing dementia.