Trial reportJournal of the American Geriatrics Society2022
Can changes in social contact (frequency and mode) mitigate low mood before and during the COVID-19 pandemic? The I-CONECT project.
Trial report in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT02871921 (Internet-based Conversational Engagement Clinical Trial), which is not on this map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Internet-based Conversational Engagement Clinical Trial
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Who Benefited Most from the Internet-Based Conversational Engagement RCT (I-CONECT)? Application of the Personalized Medicine Approach to a Behavioral Intervention Study.The journal of prevention of Alzheimer's disease · 2024Trial
- Trial
- COVID-19 Impact on Health Behaviors and Survey Engagement in Older African Americans: Longitudinal Cohort Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Observational
- Contrastive learning-based video quality assessment-jointed video vision transformer for video recognition.Neural computing & applications · 2026Article
- Violence experienced by women, their mental health status, and determinants in favelas under the pandemic COVID-19 in Brazil.BMC women's health · 2025Article
- MC-ViViT: Multi-branch Classifier-ViViT to Detect Mild Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults Using Facial Videos.Expert systems with applications · 2024Article
- Declines in social-emotional skills in college students during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- I-CONECT intervention effects on weekly time spent outside of home and social contacts among socially isolated older adults.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Weak Social Networks in Late Life Predict Incident Alzheimer's Disease: The Kuakini Honolulu-Asia Aging Study.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2023Article
- Social connectedness and mental health before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in a community sample in Korea.PloS one · 2023Article
- Social Engagement and Distress Among Home Care Recipients During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A Retrospective Cohort Study.Journal of the American Medical Directors Association · 2022Article
- Mood and activity changes during the COVID-19 pandemic in rural and urban Veterans and their cohabitants.Clinical gerontologistArticle
- Unmet Needs and Coping Strategies of Older Underserved Veterans During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Journal of primary care & community healthArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND/
objectivesThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak allowed a natural experiment to observe how older adults changed social patterns and how it affected their emotional well-being. We studied the frequency and modes of social contact and their effects on older adults' mood before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
designPhone-based surveys were administered weekly before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
settingParticipants were recruited from Portland, Oregon, and Detroit, Michigan.
participantsOlder adults ≥75 years old (n = 155, age = 81.0 ± 4.5, 72.3% women) were included in a randomized controlled trial, the Internet-Based Conversational Engagement Clinical Trial (I-CONECT). MEASUREMENTS: Low mood was self-reported as feeling downhearted or blue for three or more days in the past week. Social contact was self-reported by the amount of time spent in interactions, with whom (family, friends, others), and via which modes (in-person, phone/video call, text/email/letter).
resultsA total of 5525 weeks of data were derived from 155 participants. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, average social interaction time spent in-person, on phone/video call, and via text/email/letter was 406, 141, and 68 min/week, respectively. During the COVID-19 pandemic, time spent in-person was reduced by 135 min/week, while time spent via phone/video call and writing increased by 33 and 26 mins/week, respectively. In-person family contact was associated with less low mood regardless of the pandemic (odds ratio = 0.92, p < 0.05). There was a COVID-19 × text/email/letter with friends interaction (odds ratio = 0.77, p = 0.03), suggesting that during the COVID-19 pandemic, an increase of 1 h of writing with friends per week was associated with a 23% decrease in the likelihood of experiencing low mood.
conclusionThe lost in-person time relating to COVID-19 restrictions tended to be partially compensated for with increased calls and writing time, although overall social interaction time decreased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, at least two types of social interactions (writing to friends and in-person family time) showed promise for mitigating low mood for older adults with limited social resources.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.