Social Connection Issues Linked to Mortality

A UK prospective cohort analysis suggested that both functional (subjective) and structural (objective) measures of social connection were independently associated with all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality. The analysis included 458,146 participants with a median of 12.6 years follow-up, 33,135 (7.2%) deaths, including 5112 (1.1%) CVD deaths. Friends/family visit frequencies < monthly were associated with a higher risk of mortality. There were interactions between living alone and friends/family visits and between living alone and weekly group activity, so compared with daily friends/family visits-not living alone, there was higher all-cause mortality for daily visits-living alone (HR 1.19), for never having visits-not living alone (1.33), and for never having visits-living alone (1.7). Never having friends/family visits whilst living alone potentially masked benefits from other components as mortality risks were highest for those reporting both never having visits and living alone regardless of weekly group activity or functional components. When all measures were combined into overall functional and structural components, there was an interaction between components: compared with participants defined as not isolated by both components, those considered isolated by both components had higher CVD mortality (HR 1.63) than each component alone (functional isolation 1.17; structural isolation 1.27). The findings suggest that support may need to be tailored to address different aspects of social connection and target high risk populations. Source: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/