A new study has found that socialising by doing things such as going to the pub and playing bingo can help people avoid developing dementia. Those that have more friends at the age of 60 are less likely to develop dementia when they get older, though the study isn’t clear on whether there might be other factors at play.
The study was carried about by researchers at University College London, who used information about the amount of social contact that more than 10,000 people had with family and friends between 1985 and 2013.
The people that took part in the study were also asked to complete five cognitive tests between 1997 and 2016. The tests were designed to assess the reasoning skills of the participants as well as their verbal fluency and verbal memory. The health records of everyone involved were then used to discover if they developed dementia later in their lives.
Importantly, the test didn’t look to see what type of dementia people developed, so there were no indications as to whether or not it was Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common type of dementia, or vascular dementia, which is considered to be the second-most common.
What Was The Study About?
The study was carried out in part thanks to funding from the British Heart Foundation and it looked at civil servants based in London. Run from the mid-1980s until 2017, the Whitehall II study found that people who tended to socialise with friends on a regular basis at the age of 60 were less likely to develop dementia.
There was a difference between people that socialised with friends and those that socialised with relatives, though it’s also important to point out that the findings were not considered to be strong enough to suggest that there is a ‘statistical significance’ to the results.
It’s believed that those that only see one or two friends every couple of months are as much as 12% more likely to develop dementia than those that socialised regularly. Whilst going to the pub is one way of seeing people, it’s recommended that you imbibe soft drinks when you get there because alcohol is actually know to increase the risk of developing dementia.
The study found that you were just as likely to stave off dementia by socialising with friends at home as by going out somewhere. The study found that the age of 60 was a helpful one, with the ‘non-robust findings using social contact at 50 and 70 years indicat[ing] the need for further research’.
Cause And Effect Can’t Be Confirmed
Because of the nature of the study, it’s difficult to make definitive calls about links between socialising and not developing dementia. It’s entirely possible, for example, that being socially isolated could be a sign of dementia rather than a reason that someone develops it in the first place.
Making the leap to saying that not seeing people very often is likely to cause dementia is, therefore, likely to be incorrect.
Equally it’s possible that people that tend to socialise on a regular basis are also more likely to be physically active, which is a habit that is known to reduce the chance of getting dementia.
Researchers did look at how much vigorous exercise people did weekly, as well as explore other factors like the sex, socioeconomic status and age of the participants. Whether or not the people taking part in the study were married was also considered.
The Strength Of The Study
The study took place over an 18 year period and asked people to answer detailed questions on six occasions during that time. It covered things like how regularly they saw friends, family and other people that they know.
The length of time that it was based over is considered a definite strength, but one of the problems with the study is that it used medical records to find out if the participants had developed dementia. That means that people who are isolated are less likely to have been diagnosed and therefore might have been missed.
The observational nature of the study means that all it could do was draw a link between socialising and being less likely to develop dementia, rather than confirm whether or not socialising more is directly responsible for the lower risk of developing something like Alzheimer’s disease later in life.
Dr Andrew Sommerlad, the study’s lead author, believes that the findings are significant because dementia is a ‘major global health challenge’, given that up to a million people in the UK are expected to have developed some form of dementia by 2021.
Why Bingo Might Help Dementia?
Professor Gill Livingston, who was one of the senior authors of the study for UCL, believes that being socially active engages people’s cognitive skills like language and memory. Something like bingo, therefore, is helpful in a number of ways.
People that go to bingo halls are more likely to engage in conversation with fellow players, for example, and create a group of mates that they spend time with when playing the game. On top of that they need to work hard to remember the names given to the different numbers and also be able to mark down which ones have been called if they’re using paper tickets.
The development of a ‘cognitive reserve’ may help people ‘cope better with the effects of age’ according to Professor Livingston. She said:
“Spending more time with friends could also be good for mental wellbeing, and may correlate with being physically active, both of which can also reduce the risk of developing dementia”
With one in three cases of dementia being preventable, according to Dr Sommerlad, the more research that is done on how it can be stopped from developing the better. A representative of the Campaign To End Loneliness, Dr Kalpa Kharicha, agrees, saying that it’s important to ‘make changes to our daily lives’ in order to connect with other people.