The Relationship between Mental Health and Loneliness in the Elderly during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The results of this study show the relationship between feelings of loneliness with mental health problems in older people. This has already been extensively studied and, therefore, does not provide novel research in the field. However, I consider the instrument used to measure loneliness from a multidimensional approach very exhaustive. This can bring more precise results to the study of loneliness in the elderly.

Loneliness, understood as a feeling, can affect even those people who are not physically alone; and for this reason, I find it very interesting to compare loneliness in the social, family, and romantic dimensions (not only the total loneliness score) with the Scores for Mental Health (Table 4). However, I consider that it would also be appropriate to study the different dimensions of loneliness together with some of the demographic variables studied (such as gender, marital status, or living condition). In this way, we could know the differences between these dimensions associated with sociodemographic factors, which may be protectors or risk factors for emotional and social loneliness in older people. For instance, in previous research, the prevalence of loneliness by gender has shown contradictory results. However, in most studies carried out with older people, loneliness is greater in women than in men. In this study, no significant differences were found in terms of gender. For this reason, it would have been interesting and novel to compare the scores in the three dimensions (social, family, and romantic). In this way, new data on the impact of gender on loneliness could be shown and whether there are differences. If no significant differences were found, it would be interesting to discuss the possible causes.

On the other hand, in this study, no statistically significant correlations have been found between loneliness and the Covid-19 variable, which is a situation in which there has been greater social isolation. This would also be important to discuss since the title of the paper refers to the corona pandemic. Loneliness in older people is a very common problem regardless of the corona pandemic. Different studies have shown that loneliness is a risk factor for morbidity and mortality, and older people are more vulnerable to feeling lonely due to the changes and losses associated with age that they may experience. This circumstance should be reflected in the paper.

If the proposed improvements are carried out, studies like this are necessary to continue advancing in the study of loneliness and improvement in the quality of life of the elderly and deserve to be published.

Author Response

thank you very much for reviewer comments.

The discussion of the article is explained based on findings and further studies. Changes are marked in red in the article.

Reviewer 2 Report

Paper focuses on a very current topic.

The main objective of this paper is to understand the relationship between mental health and loneliness of the elderly in the corona pandemic.

Method, instrument, and sample are adequate, and results and it's discussion are relevant.

In any case, slight changes are necessary:

1. To place the Keywords in alphabetical order;

2. Develop the theoretical framework in the Introduction;

3. The Conclusion should be developed or integrated into the Discussion;

3. Age should have been treated as a continuous variable, and categories should not have been created to study the influence of age on loneliness or on mental health;

4. Although most of the references are recent, it doesn’t show any reference to this journal where the article intends to be published;

5. Some references are not complete. For example, in paragraph 20 the year is missing.

Author Response

thank you very much for reviewer comments.

The corrections of the article were made based on the comments.