Prognostic factors of loneliness in elderly

Abstract

Loneliness is a common form of suffering in elderly and interventions are needed. The main objective of this study is to uncover prognostic factors for social loneliness, emotional loneliness and overall loneliness to gain more insight to develop these interventions. Associations between loneliness and social-demographic attributes, physical health support and age discrimination were explored. Seventy Dutch elderly have filled out a paper questionnaire. Bivariate analyses were used to discover associations, followed by multiple regression analyses with backward elimination. Experienced and perceived age discrimination were found to be positively correlated with all types of loneliness. Having long-term diseases was positively correlated with social and overall loneliness, whereas being male only was positively correlated with overall loneliness. Additionally, age was positively correlated with emotional loneliness and having a partner was negatively correlated with emotional loneliness. The results of multivariate analyses with backward elimination show that experienced age discrimination and social support have an important role in predicting levels of loneliness in elderly. For social loneliness these two factors explained 13.8% of the variance, for emotional loneliness they explained 25.9% of the variance and for overall loneliness they explained 24.5% of the variance. When doing a second multiple regression with these variables while adding the variables with a significant correlation in the bivariate analyses, the only notable difference was that experienced age discrimination and having a partner accounted for 28.3% of the variance of emotion loneliness. Having a partner was found to be a suppressor variable for social support. Future research should consider more prognostic factors to create, expand and validate a prognostic model that could select elderly with an increased risk of being lonely, so that interventions can be more specifically tailored to this age group.