Prolonged loneliness and isolation can lead to dementia. This has been revealed by a survey of millions of people in Great Britain.
Physically, isolation reduces the volume of the parts of the brain associated with cognition. In this context, 460,000 individuals have been evaluated by the British Biobank. Research has shown that people over the average age of 57 who become lonely have a 26% increased risk of dementia over the next ten to twelve years.
Experts from the n Shanghai-based Fudan university have reported through various scanners and tests that gray matter decreases in the brains of people who live alone. These deficits occur in key areas of the brain—the temporal, frontal, and hippocampus—that play an important role in memory, perception, and concentration.
Babra Sahakian of the University of Cambridge an assistant research scholar said that people who live alone in middle age have a clear decrease in brain volume, and this is the reason that their memory and daily memory are affected first, and then Dementia and other mental disorders occur.
Experts have termed it as a very scary practice and urged us to stop the process of ending isolation from the beginning. Eventually, it passes through several stages and becomes a disease that burdens both society and physicians.