Regular contact with a friend at an older age is linked to lower dementia risk

A study of more than 10,000 older adults finds that the more social interaction they tend to have in their daily lives, the less their chances of developing dementia. Researchers looked at data from people who had been followed since the mid-1980s as part of a study and who had been surveyed about their social habits at various points in the subsequent three decades. Someone who was 60 and reported seeing a friend daily was 12% less likely to have dementia than those who didn’t have such regular contact. Similar associations were present in 50-year-olds and 70-year-olds, although those differences were not statistically significant. One caveat: The study relied on diagnoses of dementia in electronic health records, so milder cases of dementia, which may not have been recorded, could have been missed.