New research has linked richer social ties to better cognitive health in older adults, offering new insight into how connection relates to thinking and memory.

Earlier studies found links between specific social factors and health.

This study appears to be the first to build combined social profiles and test how they relate to cognitive health in older adults.

An interdisciplinary team from McGill University and Université Laval created three social environment categories, described as weaker, intermediate and richer.

They assembled 24 social variables such as network size, support, cohesion and isolation using data from about 30,000 participants in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, a nationally representative cohort of randomly selected Canadians aged 45 to 84 at baseline.

For cognition, the researchers examined three domains: executive function, which involves planning and decision-making; episodic memory, the ability to recall past events; and prospective memory, the ability to remember to perform planned actions.

They used data from a battery of tests previously administered to participants.

Daiva Nielsen is associate professor at the McGill School of Human Nutrition and co-first author of the paper

Nielsen said: “We identified significant associations between the social profiles and all three cognitive domains, with the intermediate and richer profiles generally exhibiting better cognitive outcomes than the weaker profile.”

The researcher noted that the effect size of the associations, a statistical measure of the strength of the relationship between variables, was relatively small, which is consistent with previous studies.

Nielsen noted that the effect sizes were somewhat stronger for participants aged 65 or older.

According to the researcher, this suggests that the social environment-cognition association may be more significant later in life.

Awareness has been increasing of the importance of social connection in public health.

Lack of social connection has been shown to be comparable to more widely acknowledged disease risk factors such as smoking, physical inactivity and obesity.

It is important to translate this knowledge to the public to empower individuals to help build meaningful connections within their communities.” she said.

The authors noted that the observed associations are correlational rather than causal, and it is possible, for example, that poor cognitive health also leads individuals to withdraw from social life.

The team, whose members span marketing, human behaviour, nutrition and epidemiology, hopes to continue using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging data and the newly created social profiles in future research, said Nielsen.

The next steps involve studying changes in social environments and various health-related outcomes, including diet and chronic disease risk, she added.

“This work is an excellent example of the benefits of multidisciplinary research teams that can tackle complex research questions and bring diverse knowledge and expertise.” she said.

The USC Clinical Trial Recruitment Lab will fund four projects testing how AI can strengthen recruitment for Alzheimer’s trials.

The initiative, dedicated to accelerating and improving Alzheimer’s clinical trials, selected the projects from more than 30 applicants to explore digital approaches.

Alzheimer’s clinical trials are more complex, costlier and take longer than those in other therapeutic areas, despite the pressing need for new treatments.

The lab evaluates innovative recruitment strategies to improve access and representation in trials, with the goal of identifying scalable evidence-based recruitment practices.

The USC Clinical Trial Recruitment Lab is a collaboration between the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and the USC Epstein Family Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute.

The four projects will explore the following strategies.

• Miriam Ashford at University of California, San Francisco will develop and test a generative AI voice agent to support remote informed consent and assess patient capacity for Alzheimer’s clinical trials.
• Erika Cottrell at OCHIN, a national network of community health centres, and Vijaya Kolachalama at Cognimark will integrate an AI-enabled diagnostic platform into primary care electronic health record workflows to support earlier identification and referral of patients.
• Andrew Kiselica at University of Georgia will establish a digitally enabled, trial-ready cohort of rural older adults to improve recruitment, participant selection and engagement.
• Raeanne Moore at University of California, San Diego will leverage electronic health record portals and digital cognitive assessments to accelerate prescreening and better match potential participants.

An estimated 5.6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s and related dementias, a number expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades as the population ages.

An extensive therapeutic development pipeline and new early-detection approaches, such as diagnostic blood tests and advanced digital tools, have the potential to reduce the burden of the disease.

However, fewer than one per cent of eligible individuals participate in Alzheimer’s therapeutic trials due to barriers that include limited patient awareness, health system resource constraints and lack of access to diagnostics, according to research from USC Schaeffer.

Certain populations at higher risk for the disease, including Black and Hispanic patients, remain underrepresented.

“We can only innovate as quickly as we can test new therapies,” said Dana Goldman, founding director of the USC Schaeffer Institute.

“That’s why it’s crucial we keep expanding the toolkit of evidence-based recruitment strategies for running faster, better trials.”

The lab previously funded six pilots, some of which have already yielded insights.

For example, one found remote blood collection could help identify potential participants, while another showed that offering a small gift card significantly increased enrolment in an online memory concerns registry.

“Faster and more effective recruitment is essential, and we’re excited to incorporate these solutions in an integrated way as part of our clinical trials,” said Paul Aisen, founding director of the USC Epstein Family Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute.

“As studies move earlier into pre-symptomatic disease, this opens the door to new recruitment paradigms, and continuing to push forward the science of recruitment will be critical to what comes next in Alzheimer’s research.”