Parents who worry about a child who struggles to make friends, has difficulty communicating or appears too fond of their own company have good reason to be concerned – and not just because of early-life isolation.
An international team of doctors has found evidence that the effects of early-life loneliness are not limited to childhood, with the worst impact possibly occurring long after the parents have died.
“Childhood loneliness was associated with faster cognitive decline and higher risk of incident dementia in middle and later adulthood,” the researchers said in a paper published by the American Medical Association.
“These associations remained significant when adjusted for adult loneliness and restricted to participants without adult loneliness,” they say.
Even if a lonely child grows into a sociable and outgoing adult, they are still more likely to face cognitive trouble later in life than those who reported not feeling lonely during childhood, according to the study authors.
The findings were based on a cohort study of around 13,500 participants’ data from 2011-18 and drawn from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.
“Given the current lack of effective treatments to modify the progression of dementia, identifying early, modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia is crucial for developing preventive strategies to mitigate this increasing burden of disease,” the team said, calling for interventions early in life to mitigate possible decline decades later.
“These findings suggest that childhood loneliness may serve as an independent risk factor for later-life cognitive decline and dementia,” according to the team, which included researchers at Capital Medical University and Zhejiang University in China, La Trobe University and Edith Cowan University in Australia, and Boston University School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School in the United States. – dpa
