Daisy Fancourt was at her home in Surrey in southeast England when the UK government formally announced a nationwide lockdown. Speaking in a televised address on March 23, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a suite of measures designed to curb the spread of COVID-19, including closing public spaces and requiring people to stay home except for exercise and essential tasks. For Fancourt, an epidemiologist at University College London (UCL), the announcement meant more than just a change to her daily life. It was the starting gun for a huge study, weeks in the planning, that would investigate the effects of enforced isolation and other pandemic-associated changes on the British public.
In more normal times, Fancourt and her colleagues study how social factors such as isolation influence mental and physical health. Before Johnson’s late-March announcement, the team had been watching as Italy, and subsequently other countries in Europe, began closing down public spaces and enforcing restrictions on people’s movements. They realized it wouldn’t be long before the UK followed suit. “We felt we had to start immediately collecting data,” Fancourt says. She and her colleagues rapidly laid the groundwork for a study that would track some of the effects of lockdown in real time. Between March 24 and the middle of June, the study had recruited more than 70,000 participants to fill out weekly online surveys, and in some cases answer questions in telephone interviews, about wellbeing, mental health, and coping strategies.
This project and others like it underway in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere aim to complement a broader literature on how changes in people’s interactions with those around them influence their biology. Even before COVID-19 began its global spread, millions of people were already what researchers consider to be socially isolated—separated from society, with few personal relationships and little communication with the outside world. According to European Union statistics, more than 7 percent of residents say they meet up with friends or relatives less than once a year. Surveys in the UK, meanwhile, show that half a million people over the age of 60 usually spend every day alone.
These figures are concerning to public health experts, because scientific research has revealed a link between social isolation—along with negative emotions such as loneliness that often accompany it—and poor health. “We are seeing a really growing body of evidence,” says Fancourt, “that’s showing how isolation and loneliness are linked in with incidence of different types of disease [and] with premature mortality.” Alongside myriad connections to poor physical health, including obesity and cardiovascular problems, a range of possible effects on the human brain have now been documented: Social isolation is associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia, as well as mental health consequences such as depression and anxiety.
It’ll be years before researchers understand whether and how measures enacted during the pandemic play into any of these risks. The sort of isolation people are experiencing right now is unprecedented, and is compounded with other pressures, such as fear of disease and financial strain. But now more than ever, it’s important to study the effects of social isolation, and potential means to mitigate it, says Stephanie Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist at the University of Chicago. “We’re a social species,” she says. “We really need others to survive.”
The cognitive effects of prolonged social isolation
In 1972, French adventurer and scientist Michel Siffre famously shut himself in a cave in Texas for more than six months—what still clocks in as one of the longest self-isolation experiments in history. Meticulously documenting the effects on his mind over those 205 days, Siffre wrote that he could “barely string thoughts” together after a couple months. By the five-month mark, he was reportedly so desperate for company that he tried (unsuccessfully) to befriend a mouse.
This kind of experiment, and less extreme isolation periods such as those experienced by spaceship crews or scientists working in remote Antarctic research stations, has offered glimpses of some of the cognitive and mental effects of sensory and social deprivation. People routinely report confusion, changes in personality, and episodes of anxiety and depression. A crueler version of those experiments is continually underway in prisons across the world. In the US alone, tens of thousands of incarcerated people are in long-term solitary confinement, with devastating and lasting effects on cognitive and mental health. (See “Extreme Isolation” below.)
For most of human society, however, social isolation acts in more insidious ways than these “experiments” capture, often disproportionately affecting vulnerable members of the population, such as the elderly, and with effects accumulating slowly such that they may go unnoticed for many years, if not decades. The effects of this subtler sort of social isolation, which some health researchers and psychologists have already described as a public health risk, are better observed in longer-term studies that look for links between a person’s social connections and how the mind functions.
Many studies have found that chronic social isolation is indeed associated with cognitive decline, and that isolation often precedes decline by several years. One 2013 study, for example, measured cognitive function at two time points in a cohort of more than 6,000 older individuals taking part in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). People who reported having fewer social contacts and activities at the beginning of the study, researchers found, showed greater decline in cognitive function, as measured by verbal fluency and memory recall tasks, after four years.
by Catherine Offord, The Scientist | Read more:
In more normal times, Fancourt and her colleagues study how social factors such as isolation influence mental and physical health. Before Johnson’s late-March announcement, the team had been watching as Italy, and subsequently other countries in Europe, began closing down public spaces and enforcing restrictions on people’s movements. They realized it wouldn’t be long before the UK followed suit. “We felt we had to start immediately collecting data,” Fancourt says. She and her colleagues rapidly laid the groundwork for a study that would track some of the effects of lockdown in real time. Between March 24 and the middle of June, the study had recruited more than 70,000 participants to fill out weekly online surveys, and in some cases answer questions in telephone interviews, about wellbeing, mental health, and coping strategies.This project and others like it underway in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere aim to complement a broader literature on how changes in people’s interactions with those around them influence their biology. Even before COVID-19 began its global spread, millions of people were already what researchers consider to be socially isolated—separated from society, with few personal relationships and little communication with the outside world. According to European Union statistics, more than 7 percent of residents say they meet up with friends or relatives less than once a year. Surveys in the UK, meanwhile, show that half a million people over the age of 60 usually spend every day alone.
These figures are concerning to public health experts, because scientific research has revealed a link between social isolation—along with negative emotions such as loneliness that often accompany it—and poor health. “We are seeing a really growing body of evidence,” says Fancourt, “that’s showing how isolation and loneliness are linked in with incidence of different types of disease [and] with premature mortality.” Alongside myriad connections to poor physical health, including obesity and cardiovascular problems, a range of possible effects on the human brain have now been documented: Social isolation is associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia, as well as mental health consequences such as depression and anxiety.
It’ll be years before researchers understand whether and how measures enacted during the pandemic play into any of these risks. The sort of isolation people are experiencing right now is unprecedented, and is compounded with other pressures, such as fear of disease and financial strain. But now more than ever, it’s important to study the effects of social isolation, and potential means to mitigate it, says Stephanie Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist at the University of Chicago. “We’re a social species,” she says. “We really need others to survive.”
The cognitive effects of prolonged social isolation
In 1972, French adventurer and scientist Michel Siffre famously shut himself in a cave in Texas for more than six months—what still clocks in as one of the longest self-isolation experiments in history. Meticulously documenting the effects on his mind over those 205 days, Siffre wrote that he could “barely string thoughts” together after a couple months. By the five-month mark, he was reportedly so desperate for company that he tried (unsuccessfully) to befriend a mouse.
This kind of experiment, and less extreme isolation periods such as those experienced by spaceship crews or scientists working in remote Antarctic research stations, has offered glimpses of some of the cognitive and mental effects of sensory and social deprivation. People routinely report confusion, changes in personality, and episodes of anxiety and depression. A crueler version of those experiments is continually underway in prisons across the world. In the US alone, tens of thousands of incarcerated people are in long-term solitary confinement, with devastating and lasting effects on cognitive and mental health. (See “Extreme Isolation” below.)
For most of human society, however, social isolation acts in more insidious ways than these “experiments” capture, often disproportionately affecting vulnerable members of the population, such as the elderly, and with effects accumulating slowly such that they may go unnoticed for many years, if not decades. The effects of this subtler sort of social isolation, which some health researchers and psychologists have already described as a public health risk, are better observed in longer-term studies that look for links between a person’s social connections and how the mind functions.
Many studies have found that chronic social isolation is indeed associated with cognitive decline, and that isolation often precedes decline by several years. One 2013 study, for example, measured cognitive function at two time points in a cohort of more than 6,000 older individuals taking part in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). People who reported having fewer social contacts and activities at the beginning of the study, researchers found, showed greater decline in cognitive function, as measured by verbal fluency and memory recall tasks, after four years.
by Catherine Offord, The Scientist | Read more:
Image: Istock.com, Maria Zamchy
