Objective: To establish the prevalence and determinants of loneliness among people living with dementia.Methods: Using data from the baseline wave of the Improving the experience of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life (IDEAL) cohort study, we examined the prevalence and predictors of loneliness in 1547 people with mild‐to‐moderate dementia. Loneliness was assessed using the six‐item De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale.Results: About 30.1% of people with dementia reported feeling moderately lonely and 5.2% severely lonely. Depressive symptoms and increased risk of social isolation were associated with both moderate and severe loneliness. Those living alone were more likely to experience severe loneliness as were those reporting poorer quality of life. Marital status was not associated with loneliness nor were dementia diagnosis or cognitive function.Conclusions: This is one of the few large‐scale studies to explore the prevalence of and determinants of loneliness among people living with dementia. Social isolation, depression and living alone were associated with experiencing loneliness. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine the directionality of these associations.

The hostile environment that older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people faced at younger ages in the United Kingdom (UK) may have a lasting negative impact on their health. This systematic scoping review adds to the current knowledge base through comprehensively synthesising evidence on what is known about the extent and nature of health and care inequalities, as well as highlighting gaps in the evidence which point the way towards future research priorities. We searched four databases, undertook manual searching, and included studies which presented empirical findings on LGBT people aged 50+ in the UK and their physical and mental health or social care status. From a total of 5,738 records, 48 papers from 42 studies were eligible and included for data extraction. The synthesis finds that inequities exist across physical and mental health, as well as in social care, exposure to violence and loneliness. Social care environments appeared as a focal point for inequities and formal care environments severely compromised the identity and relationships that older LGBT people developed over their lifecourse. Conversely, the literature demonstrated how some older LGBT people successfully negotiated age-related transitions,e.g.emphasising the important role of LGBT-focused social groups in offsetting social isolation and loneliness. While there exist clear policy implications around the requirement for formal care environments to change to accommodate an increasingly diverse older population, there is also a need to explore how to support older LGBT people to maintain their independence for longer, reducing the need for formal care.

This study investigates evidence, from dream reports, for memory consolidation during sleep. It is well-known that events and memories from waking life can be incorporated into dreams. These incorporations can be a literal replication of what occurred in waking life, or, more often, they can be partial or indirect. Two types of temporal relationship have been found to characterize the time of occurrence of a daytime event and the reappearance or incorporation of its features in a dream. These temporal relationships are referred to as the day-residue or immediate incorporation effect, where there is the reappearance of features from events occurring on the immediately preceding day, and the dream-lag effect, where there is the reappearance of features from events occurring 5–7 days prior to the dream. Previous work on the dream-lag effect has used spontaneous home recalled dream reports, which can be from Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (REM) and from non-Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (NREM). This study addresses whether the dream-lag effect occurs only for REM sleep dreams, or for both REM and NREM stage 2 (N2) dreams. 20 participants kept a daily diary for over a week before sleeping in the sleep laboratory for 2 nights. REM and N2 dreams collected in the laboratory were transcribed and each participant rated the level of correspondence between every dream report and every diary record. The dream-lag effect was found for REM but not N2 dreams. Further analysis indicated that this result was not due to N2 dream reports being shorter, in terms of number of words, than the REM dream reports. These results provide evidence for a 7-day sleep-dependent non-linear memory consolidation process that is specific to REM sleep, and accord with proposals for the importance of REM sleep to emotional memory consolidation.