Social isolation, loneliness, and their joint effects on cognitive decline and incident Alzheimer's disease: Findings from the Chicago health and aging project.

Background: There has been contradictory evidence on the prospective associations between social isolation/loneliness (SI/L) and cognitive decline (CD). There is also a scarcity of large and diverse population-based cohort studies examining SI/L that have confirmed clinical diagnoses of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Notably, beyond individual associations, whether the effects of SI/L compound and accelerate CD and incident AD are not known.