Trajectories of physical, mental health and health satisfaction before and after arthritis diagnosis: a UK population-based study.

Background: Few longitudinal studies have explored changes in physical and mental health in individuals prior to and after arthritis diagnosis. This is important for understanding timing of diagnosis in relation to symptoms and their broader health impacts.

Methods: Adults (≥ 16 years) reporting new diagnoses of arthritis between 2010 and 2023 in the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) were included in the study (N = 5,258), along with a 1:1 matched sample of arthritis-free individuals.

Will things feel better in the morning? A time-of-day analysis of mental health and wellbeing from nearly 1 million observations.

Background: Mood is known to change over seasons of the year, days of the week, and even over the course of the day (diurnally). But although broader mental health and well-being also vary over months and weeks, it is unclear whether there are diurnal changes in how people experience and report their mental health.

Objective: To assess time-of-day association with depression, anxiety, well-being and loneliness.

Prosocial Intentions and Subsequent Cognitive Health: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Objectives: Prosociality, defined as positive other-regarding intentions and behaviors, is a modifiable factor demonstrated to be associated with better mental, physical, and cognitive health in older adults. Prior studies have largely focused on individual prosocial behaviors, especially volunteering. This study examines whether prosocial intentions are associated with maintaining cognitive health over time.

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.

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).

Participatory and Receptive Arts Engagement in Older Adults: Associations with Cognition Over a Seven-Year Period.

There is growing evidence for the impact of arts engagement on later life cognition. However, confounding by socioeconomic factors may have led to an overestimation of this association. We analyzed data from 4,344 older adults in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study.

The Changing Relationship Between Hobby Engagement and Substance Use in Young People: Latent Growth Modelling of the Add Health Cohort.

Cross-sectional and some longitudinal evidence suggests doing hobbies can reduce substance use, but findings have been inconsistent, and whether associations differ across adolescence remains unclear. This study included 7454 Add Health participants (50% female, 77% White, age mean=14.95 and SD = 1.

Unraveling the role of plasma proteins in dementia: insights from two cohort studies in the UK, with causal evidence from Mendelian randomization.

Population-based proteomics offer a groundbreaking avenue to predict dementia onset. This study employed a proteome-wide, data-driven approach to investigate protein-dementia associations in 229 incident all-cause dementia (ACD) among 3,249 participants from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) over a median 9.8-year follow-up, then validated in 1,506 incident ACD among 52,745 individuals from the UK Biobank (UKB) over median 13.

Leisure engagement in older age is related to objective and subjective experiences of aging.

Leisure engagement has potential to slow health and functional decline in older age. However, the benefits of different leisure domains for different aspects of aging remains unclear. In 8771 older adults from the Health and Retirement Study (a longitudinal panel study), we measured engagement in physical, creative, cognitive, and community activities.

Variation in symptoms of common mental disorders in the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic: longitudinal cohort study.

Background: A significant rise in mental health disorders was expected during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, referrals to mental health services dropped for several months before rising to pre-pandemic levels.

Aims: To identify trajectories of incidence and risk factors for common mental disorders among the general population during 14 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, to inform potential mental health service needs.

Leisure Engagement and Self-Perceptions of Aging: Longitudinal Analysis of Concurrent and Lagged Relationships.

Objectives: There is evidence to suggest that leisure engagement may influence self-perceptions of aging, but disentangling potential bidirectionality in this relationship is challenging. A better understanding of the directionality of this association is essential for designing more effective interventions to promote healthy aging. We, therefore, tested concurrent effects and lagged effects in both directions for a univariate measure of leisure engagement as well as specific domains of community, cognitive, creative, and physical activities.

Receptive and participatory arts engagement and subsequent healthy aging: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study.

Rationale: Arts engagement is associated with prolonged longevity, but it remains unclear whether it is also associated with increases in the portion of people's lives for which they remain healthy. We investigated whether receptive and participatory arts engagement were associated with healthy aging two and four years later.

Method: We included 1269 older adults from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal study of individuals aged 50 and above in the United States.

Associations between extracurricular arts activities, school-based arts engagement, and subsequent externalising behaviours in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.

Adolescent externalising behaviours are associated with numerous long-term negative outcomes, although most research is intervention-based as opposed to risk reduction. Arts engagement has been associated with numerous beneficial factors linked to externalising behaviours, yet direct evidence linking them in longitudinal studies is lacking. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study were used, with baseline at 5th grade and outcomes measured at 8th grade.

The state of loneliness and social isolation research: current knowledge and future directions.

In this editorial, we consider the current state of loneliness and social isolation research around the world, including knowledge gaps in the empirical literature.

Wellbeing while waiting evaluating social prescribing in CAMHS: study protocol for a hybrid type II implementation-effectiveness study.

Background: Social prescribing is a mechanism of connecting patients with non-medical forms of support within the community and has been shown to improve mental health and wellbeing in adult populations. In the last few years, it has been used in child and youth settings with promising results. Currently, pathways are being developed for social prescribing in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to support children and young people on treatment waiting lists.

Depressive and anxiety symptoms in adults during the COVID-19 pandemic in England: A panel data analysis over 2 years.

Background: There has been much research into the mental health impact of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and how it is related to time-invariant individual characteristics. However, there is still a lack of research showing long-term trajectories of mental health across different stages of the pandemic. And little is known regarding the longitudinal association of time-varying factors with mental health outcomes.

Longitudinal Associations Between Arts Engagement and Flourishing in Young Adults: A Fixed Effects Analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Unlabelled: There is growing evidence on the impact of arts engagement on flourishing. However, social gradients in arts engagement and flourishing may have led to an overestimation of this impact, and there is a lack of longitudinal research in young people. We aimed to test the longitudinal associations between arts engagement and flourishing in emerging adults, accounting for observed and unobserved individual characteristics.

Creative leisure activities, mental health and well-being during 5 months of the COVID-19 pandemic: a fixed effects analysis of data from 3725 US adults.

Introduction: We investigated whether changes in engagement in home-based creative activities were associated with changes in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms and life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to replicate findings from the UK in a USA sample.

Methods: 3725 adults were included from the COVID-19 Social Study in the USA, a panel study collecting data weekly during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured engagement in eight types of creative leisure activities on the previous weekday between April and September 2020.

Psychological consequences of long COVID: comparing trajectories of depressive and anxiety symptoms before and after contracting SARS-CoV-2 between matched long- and short-COVID groups.

Background: There is a growing global awareness of the psychological consequences of long COVID, supported by emerging empirical evidence. However, the emergence and long-term trajectories of psychological symptoms following the infection are still unclear.

Aims: To examine when psychological symptoms first emerge following infection with SARS-CoV-2 and the long-term trajectories of psychological symptoms comparing long- and short-COVID groups.