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A longitudinal analysis of loneliness, social isolation and falls amongst older people in England

Bu, F; Abell, J; Zaninotto, P; Fancourt, D; (2020) A longitudinal analysis of loneliness, social isolation and falls amongst older people in England. Scientific Reports , 10 , Article 20064. 10.1038/s41598-020-77104-z. Green open access

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Abstract

Loneliness and social isolation have been identifed as important predictors of various health outcomes, but little research has investigated their infuence on falls. This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal association between loneliness, social isolation and falls amongst older adults in England, looking at both self-reported falls and falls that require hospital admissions. This study drew on large scale, nationally representative data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing linked with Hospital Episode Statistics. Data were analysed using survival analysis, with self-reported falls (total sample = 4013) and falls require hospital admission being modelled separately (total sample = 9285). There was a 5% increase in the hazard of self-reported falls relative to one point increase in loneliness independent of socio-demographic factors (HR: 1.05, 95% CI: 1.02–1.08), but the association was explained away by individual diferences in health and life-style measures (HR: 1.03, 95% CI: 1.00–1.07). Both living alone (HR: 1.18, 95% CI: 1.07–1.32) and low social contact (HR: 1.04, 95% CI: 1.01–1.07) were associated with a greater hazard of self-reported falls even after controlling for socio-demographic, health and life-style diferences. Similar results were also found for hospital admissions following a fall. Our fndings were robust to a variety of model specifcations.

Type: Article
Title: A longitudinal analysis of loneliness, social isolation and falls amongst older people in England
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77104-z
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77104-z
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Behavioural Science and Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Epidemiology and Public Health
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10117314
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