Loneliness is linked to greater menopausal symptom burden

In a cross-sectional study of 4,124 women from the nationwide web-based CLIMATERE cohort, researchers evaluated how loneliness and social isolation relate to menopausal symptoms. Participants completed the Greene Climacteric Scale (GCS), which tracks symptom burden and showed a sample median of 17. Investigators classified women into four mutually exclusive categories based on loneliness and objective social isolation.

In fully adjusted models, loneliness alone was associated with a higher continuous GCS score (B = 2.91, 95% CI 1.61 to 4.22), higher odds of being in a higher GCS quartile (OR = 1.77, 95% CI 1.36 to 2.30), and higher odds of severe symptom burden (OR = 1.68, 95% CI 1.13 to 2.50). Co-occurring loneliness and social isolation was associated with continuous and ordinal GCS scores but not severe burden. The association for social isolation alone was unstable and changed direction or disappeared under alternative isolation thresholds.