Dementia Risk: Hearing Loss

The jury is still out, but we ought to LISTEN

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

I’ll get to the point:

If you have hearing loss—especially earlier in life—you may be at increased risk of developing dementia as you age.

If this is true, then we need to double down on hearing testing in our grade schools, and put more emphasis on declines in this sense as a PREVENTABLE contributor to dementia.

I offer a little background from a single article below (since most readers here do not click links anyway.) You can and should pursue this if it concerns you—for yourself or someone you love.

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Notes below extracted from The Link Between Hearing Loss and Dementia but you can EASILY find much more information on this important topic.

• Studies by John Hopkins and the National Institute on Aging are looking at the strong link between hearing loss and dementia

• Does hearing loss CAUSE dementia? Mechanisms are proposed. Individuals with hearing loss are five times more likely to develop dementia. However, having hearing loss does not condemn you to develop dementia.

• Brains that don’t get normal activation (from our sense organs) will shrink. That can’t be good.

• Cochlear implants in a small (N=100) experimental group produced cognitive improvement in 80% of subjects — who also reported less depression, another contributor to decreased social contacts that can contribute to dementia.

That’s all. I wanted to put this out there to my tiny troop of newsletter readers in the hopes that someone out there might benefit from this insufficiently well known health fact.