Loneliness and isolation: Are they associated with the wish for an earlier end of life?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: To examine the association of loneliness and social isolation with the desired age at death among middle-aged and older adults in Germany. METHODS: Data were taken from the German Aging Survey (wave 8: nationally representative sample of community-dwelling individuals aged ≥43 years; n = 3826). The mean age equaled 69.3 years (SD 11.3 years, 43-99 years). Loneliness and social isolation were both quantified using psychometrically sound and widely used tools. Several sociodemographic, lifestyle-related and health-related covariates were included in linear regression analysis (with robust standard errors). RESULTS: The mean desired age at death was 90.1 years (SD 8.0 years). Regressions showed that there was a robust association of loneliness (β = -1.47, P < 0.001) and social isolation (β = -1.49, P < 0.001) with lower desired age at death among the total sample, even after adjusting for a wide array of covariates. In the fully-adjusted model, such associations were also present among both men and women (with significant sex differences for the association between loneliness and the outcome; i.e., more pronounced association between loneliness and the desired age at death among men). CONCLUSIONS: Loneliness (among men in particular) and social isolation were both associated with a lower desired age at death. This stresses the importance of tackling loneliness and social isolation in later life. It is of note that this is the very first study examining the association of loneliness and social isolation with the desired age at death. Thus, it can serve as a basis for future studies. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2025; 25: 1412-1417.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".