Patterns of Social Connection Among Older Adults in England.

Importance: Issues related to social connection are increasingly recognized as a global public health priority. However, there is a lack of a holistic understanding of social connection and its health impacts given that most empirical research focuses on a single or few individual concepts of social connection.

Objective: To explore patterns of social connection and their associations with health and well-being outcomes.

A qualitative exploration of active ingredients and mechanisms of action of an online singing programme with mothers experiencing postnatal depression during the COVID-19 pandemic: SHAPER-PNDO study.

Background: Social distancing restrictions and the suspension of in-person treatment and support contributed to an increase in postnatal depression during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Creative health interventions can help to alleviate anxiety and depression, with studies showing that singing is particularly effective for supporting the mental health of new mothers. We adapted an in-person group singing programme (Breathe Melodies for Mums (M4M)) to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic to support the mental health of new mothers, and, in a feasibility study, found improvements in postnatal depression (PND) symptoms at 6-month follow up.

Art for health's sake or health for art's sake: Disentangling the bidirectional relationships between arts engagement and mental health.

Increasing evidence links arts engagement with mental health, but the directionality of the link remains unclear. Applying a novel approach to causal inference, we used nonrecursive instrumental variable models to analyze two waves of data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study ( = 17,927). Our findings reveal bidirectional causal relationships between arts engagement (arts participation, cultural attendance, and heritage visits) and mental health (GHQ-12 mental distress and SF-12 Mental Component Summary mental well-being).

Protein signatures associated with loneliness and social isolation: Plasma proteome analyses in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, with causal evidence from Mendelian randomization.

Introduction: The understanding of biological pathways related to loneliness and social isolation remains incomplete. Cutting-edge population-based proteomics offers opportunities to uncover novel biological pathways linked to social deficits.

Methods: This study employed a proteome-wide and data-driven approach to estimate the cross-sectional associations between objective measures of social connections (i.