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Social connections are differentially related to subjective age and physiological age acceleration amongst older adults
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  • Published: 30 January 2026

Social connections are differentially related to subjective age and physiological age acceleration amongst older adults

  • Daisy Fancourt  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6952-334X1,
  • Andrew Steptoe  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-49431 &
  • Mikaela Bloomberg2 

Nature Communications , Article number:  (2026) Cite this article

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We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

Subjects

  • Predictive markers
  • Risk factors

Abstract

Human social connections are complex ecosystems formed of structural, functional and quality components. Weak social connections are associated with adverse age-related health outcomes, but we know little about the ageing-related processes underlying this. Using data from 7047 adults aged 50+ in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we explore associations between diverse aspects of social connections and both older subjective age and accelerated physiological age using a validated physiological ageing combining cardiovascular, respiratory, haematologic and metabolic indicators. Doubly robust estimations using inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment estimators show that living alone, low social integration and low social support are risk factors for physiological age acceleration. However, weak social connections did not have a statistically significant association with older subjective age. Analyses are robust to multiple sensitivity analyses and maintained four years later. We propose the hypothesis that accelerated physiological ageing may be a mechanism underpinning the relationship between weak social connections and age-related morbitidy and mortality.

Data availability

ELSA data are available from the UK Data Service https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5050-35.

Code availability

Code is available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17986826.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the UK Research and Innovation [MR/Y01068X/1] and grants for the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (NIH: R01AG017644 and NIHR: 198-1074).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavioural Science and Health, UCL, London, UK

    Daisy Fancourt & Andrew Steptoe

  2. Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, UCL, London, UK

    Mikaela Bloomberg

Authors
  1. Daisy Fancourt
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  2. Andrew Steptoe
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  3. Mikaela Bloomberg
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Contributions

M.B. and A.S. derived the physiological ageing index. D.F. and A.S. designed the current study. D.F. ran the analyses and drafted the manuscript. All authors critically appraised the manuscript and approved it for submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daisy Fancourt.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Communications thanks Fereshteh Mehrabi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.

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Fancourt, D., Steptoe, A. & Bloomberg, M. Social connections are differentially related to subjective age and physiological age acceleration amongst older adults. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68977-1

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  • Received: 09 January 2025

  • Accepted: 22 January 2026

  • Published: 30 January 2026

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68977-1

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