Social relationships, psychological distress, and physical health in sexual minority and heterosexual middle-aged and older adults in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social connections are crucial for healthy aging, and health disparities are particularly pronounced among sexual minorities. This secondary data analysis investigates longitudinal associations between social relationships and physical health in 1,057 participants of whom 26% identified as lesbian, 50% as gay, and 24% as bisexual people (Mage = 59 years, 38% women, 62% men) and a matched heterosexual control group. Participants reported social support, social isolation, and health behaviors 3 times at 3-year intervals; a subset (n = 665) provided information on psychological distress and physiological assessments. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults reported lower social support, higher social isolation, higher psychological distress, and lower physical activity (only men), compared to heterosexual controls. Groups did not significantly differ in nutritional risk or allostatic load. Social vulnerabilities were most prominent among gay and bisexual men as well as bisexual women, but not lesbian women. Controlling for autoregressive effects, we found little evidence for longitudinal associations of social support or social isolation with physical health. However, we found indirect associations between lower social support and subsequent worse physical health (nutritional risk, physical activity, allostatic load) mediated by increased psychological distress (both groups). Findings underscore the need for interventions to increase social belonging, and to address the unique social and physical health challenges of aging sexual minority adults.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".