The health and well-being consequences of social isolation and loneliness in old age are increasingly being recognised. The purpose of this scoping review was to take stock of the available evidence and to highlight gaps and areas for future research. We searched nine databases for empirical papers investigating the impact of social isolation and/or loneliness on a range of health outcomes in o...

BACKGROUND Postweaning social isolation in rats produces profound and long-lasting cognitive and behavioral deficits in adult animals. Importantly, this housing manipulation alters sensitivity to a number of drugs of abuse including ethanol. However, most studies with ethanol have utilized continuous or limited home-cage access to examine interactions between juvenile social experience and drin...

NOTES 3 To minimize any context bias associated with survey fatigue or priming from prior questions, the two name generator questions were located close to the start of the survey. They were placed after a small number of questions about basic internet use that were used to establish trust with the survey participant. 4 Previous research has identified a high degree of overlap between those wit...

This study investigates the relationships among social isolation, psychological health, and protective factors in adolescents. Feelings of social isolation may influence psychological health in adolescents, but protective factors such as family connectedness, school connectedness, and academic achievement may also play a key role. The sample included 4,746 adolescents from 31 middle and high sc...

Background: A few studies have addressed the impact of stoma on patients’ social life. This study aimed to understand the problems leading to social isolation of patients undergoing ostomy. Methods: A conventional qualitative content analysis by unstructured interviews was conducted on 27 patients with intestinal or urinary diversion ostomy recruited from the Iranian Ostomy&nbs...

BACKGROUND Social networks are increasingly recognized as important points of intervention, yet relatively few intervention studies of respiratory infection transmission have utilized a network design. Here we describe the design, methods, and social network structure of a randomized intervention for isolating respiratory infection cases in a university setting over a 10-week period. METHODOL...

Early social isolation results in adult behavioral and cognitive dysfunction that correlates with white matter alterations. However, how social deprivation influences myelination and the significance of these myelin defects in the adult remained undefined. We show that mice isolated for 2 weeks immediately after weaning have alterations in prefrontal cortex function and myelination that do not ...

Context With the dramatic increase in life expectancy in developed countries, it has become important to identify factors that may mitigate the rising prevalence of cognitive dementia. The social environment in which older adults live has been linked to dementia, but the specific features of the social environment that are predictive have been elusive. Shankar and colleagues investigated the ex...

Hermes, Gretchen L., Louis Rosenthal, Anthony Montag, and Martha K. McClintock. Social isolation and the inflammatory response: sex differences in the enduring effects of a prior stressor. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 290: R273–R282, 2006. First published October 6, 2005; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00368.2005.—Numerous epidemiological studies have demonstrated an association between persiste...