Health risks associated with social isolation in general and in young, middle and old age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Health effects of social isolation are well-studied at older age, in English-speaking countries, for individual health conditions, and based on unidimensional measures of isolation. Hardly any evidence exists for younger ages, for continental European and particularly German-speaking countries and based on multidimensional measures of isolation. This study therefore aimed to examine prevalence rates and associations of social isolation with various health conditions and behaviors in the entire Swiss population and across different age groups. METHODS: Nationally representative cross-sectional data from the Swiss Health Survey collected in 2012 were used and analyzed. The study sample covered 21,597 randomly selected adolescents and adults living in Switzerland and aged 15 and older. A multifactorial five-item social integration index was used to assess social disconnectedness and perceived isolation. RESULTS: Social isolation has been found to steadily increase with age and almost consistently to be strongly associated with poor health conditions and unfavorable behaviors across all ages. Nearly a quarter of the general population could be categorized as either only partly integrated or even poorly integrated and largely isolated. The socially isolated people independent of their age showed strongly elevated relative risks of poor self-rated health (aOR = 4.0), musculoskeletal disorders (aOR = 2.8), moderate to severe depression (aOR = 11.5), and multiple health problems (aOR = 5.0). They were also found to be at comparably high risk of behaving unhealthy with regard to physical inactivity (aOR = 2.2), poor diet (aOR = 1.9) and use of psychotropic medications (aOR = 3.6). Although prevalence rates of poor health conditions and behaviors differed greatly between the studied age groups, strong associations and clear dose-response relationships have been found separately for all age groups and particularly for the youngest. A fairly weak or no association at all (depending on the age group) with the degree of social integration was observed only for daily smoking. CONCLUSIONS: Social isolation may be less prevalent at younger ages, but is then even more strongly associated with poor health conditions and behaviors than at older ages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".