Does Socialisation Reduce Cognitive Decline? A New Study Says Yes

For people who don’t already have dementia, but are worried about it, learning about protective factors and risk factors for cognitive decline is one of the only steps you can take. A common piece of advice is to remain socially active, but does it really make a difference?

A new study [1] looked into this and found a very clear correlation between higher levels of social engagement and better cognitive performance.

Why Researching the Impact of Social Engagement is Difficult

Defining social engagement isn’t as easy as you might think. As a paper tackling this issue points out, researchers tend to use many different, overlapping terms. For example, social participation, social connectedness and community engagement are all used, and other studies may focus instead on social isolation. The paper points out that the subtle distinctions between these methods makes it difficult to interpret the evidence as a whole.

What the New Study Adds

The new research [1] used a composite measure called the Social Engagement Index, which covers specific things like whether you live with other people, whether you went out for fun in the past month, whether you visited friends or family, whether you’re married, employed and more. The idea is to cover many metrics of social engagement and use all of them to produce the final score.

They used data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study from 2011 to 2019, which covers Americans aged 65 or older enrolled in Medicare, and discounted anyone likely to have dementia at the start of the study. They found that higher social engagement (at baseline) was associated with a reduced decline in memory, orientation (i.e. what day is it? Who is the vice president?) and executive function. This was also incremental: the more engaged, the better the outcome.

Does Social Engagement Reduce Cognitive Decline?

The overall picture isn’t as clear as we might like. A “systematic review of reviews” covered this issue (section 4.1 for a summary) and despite emphasizing that low social engagement increases your risk, concluded that the data on the presumed protective effect is inconsistent. That said, the difference between a protective effect and avoiding an increase in risk seems more of a philosophical issue than a practical one.

As the new study also suggests, it certainly seems better to be socially engaged than to not be.