Social, environmental, and cognitive correlates of community‐dwelling older adults coping poorly with reduced social contact: A quasi‐experiment set in Australia’s COVID‐19 lockdown in 2020
Russell J Chander, Katya T. Numbers, Rory Chen, Suraj Samtani, Nicole A. Kochan, Henry Brodaty, Perminder S. Sachdev · 2025
Read Social, environmental, and cognitive correlates of community‐dwelling older adults coping poorly with reduced social contact: A quasi‐experiment set in Australia’s COVID‐19 lockdown in 2020 by Russell J Chander, Katya T. Numbers, Rory Chen, Suraj Samtani, Nicole A. Kochan, Henry Brodaty, Perminder S. Sachdev (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11713300.txt.
Description
Russell Chander and co-authors use Australia's long lockdowns as a natural experiment on what isolation does to older minds. Sydney's older adults, drawn from three long-running studies, answered mailed questionnaires in 2020 about their contact, resources, and wellbeing, and the answers were linked to their pre-pandemic medical and cognitive records. Their 2025 paper asks who coped poorly, and what marked them in advance.
Poor coping meant feeling worse in overall health, in emotional health, or in physical activity. Of 335 respondents, about twenty-two percent met the study's definition of cognitive impairment. The analysis weighs social, environmental, and thinking-related factors together, since isolation's harm rarely travels one road. The authors' aim is practical: if services must again thin out, or as ordinary aging thins people's worlds anyway, the correlates name in advance who will need the knock on the door.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Russell J Chander, Katya T. Numbers, Rory Chen, Suraj Samtani, Nicole A. Kochan, Henry Brodaty, Perminder S. Sachdev |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 3 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |