The relationship of social isolation and sleep in older adults: evidence from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies

Abstract

Objectives

This study aimed to explore the relationship between social isolation and sleep in later life and the role of loneliness in this relationship.

Methods

In Study 1, we conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the correlation between social isolation and sleep in community-dwelling older adults (N = 108). This relationship was assessed using subjective and objective measures. Moreover, we examined the mediating role of loneliness cross-sectionally (Study 1) and longitudinally (Study 2). Longitudinal study was based on three waves of data from the National Scale Life, Health, and Aging Project (N = 1, 554).

Results

The results showed that social isolation was robustly associated with sleep in the general population of older adults. Specifically, subjective social isolation was associated with subjective sleep, and objective social isolation was associated with objective sleep. The results of the longitudinal study showed that loneliness mediated the reciprocal link between social isolation and sleep across time after controlling for autoregressive effects and basic demographics.

Conclusions

These findings address the gap in the literature on the link between social isolation and sleep in older adults, extending the understanding of improvement in older adults' social networks, sleep quality, and psychological well-being.

Keywords:

• Social isolation
• sleep
• loneliness
• cross-lagged panel modeling

Acknowledgments

The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (PI: Linda Waite) was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health (R01AG021487, R37AG030481, R01AG033903, R01AG043538, and R01AG048511).

Authorship contributions

HXJ managed the project, developed the models, reviewed the results, and finalized the manuscript based on comments from other authors. JJJ, JHW, and CCN assisted in data collection. JY and YL reviewed the results, provided guidance on the methods, and reviewed the manuscript. All the authors contributed to this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The authors are responsible for the content and writing of this manuscript.

Data availability

All raw data and analysis scripts used to derive at the here presented results are available in the OSF (https://osf.io/ca2x9/?view_only=128a04bbe96544cb81dec6963c2cd780).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31971007), and CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology (KLMH2019K02).