The experience of loneliness among older people in New Zealand is most acute among those aged between 66 and 70, a University of Otago study has revealed.
Otago researchers surveyed more than 70,000 older people across NZ and defined loneliness as “a distressing discrepancy between desired and actual levels of social contact”. Surprisingly, it found that centenarians were least likely to be lonely compared with other groups aged from 65 to 99 years.
The results are published online in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.
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