3 ms·
Is this a correlation->causation thing, where people who experience significant hearing loss also experience dementia more than healthier people who have health
by unsupp0rted 3y ago
Is this a correlation->causation thing, where people who experience significant hearing loss also experience dementia more than healthier people who have healthy ears and healthy brains?
- KineticLensman 3y agoIrrespective of the (possible) causative link between hearing loss and dementia, the argument is that hearing loss treated with heating aids reduces the likelihood of dementia. Anecdotally, I wear hearing aids. I'm always amazed at how much more in contact with the world I feel when wearing them. Without them, all the little background sounds that you perceive are gone. E.g. People chatting. The rustling of your clothes. Birdsong. Running taps. The knocking sound in your car, etc etc. I am totally prepared to believe that the loss of this stimulation increases mental isolation and atrophy. As a child (with good hearing) I always assumed that I would choose eyesight over hearing if I had to make a choice. Nowadays, it would be a much closer run thing.
- detourdog 3y agoThank you for sharing that I will be thinking about it all day.
- meijer 3y agoI tend to isolate myself from the environment using noise-cancelling headphones. Now I'm wondering if this might be a bad idea, neurologically speaking...
- unsupp0rted 3y agoDepends… what are you listening to on your headphones? Or maybe it doesn’t matter.
- ezfe 3y agoI've had hearing loss my whole life and I wear them all the time on most days. However, I do find a sort of peace not wearing my hearing aids. If the house is empty I usually don't put my hearing aids on for hours in the morning.
- onetruegooby 3y agoAccording to the journal article, they had a control group that didn't receive hearing aids. Also, all the participants in the study had hearing loss. "Participants were randomly assigned (1:1) to a hearing intervention (audiological counselling and provision of hearing aids) or a control intervention of health education (individual sessions with a health educator covering topics on chronic disease prevention) and followed up every 6 months." from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)01406-X/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
- xeromal 3y agoThe opening sentence in the article says that introducing hearing aids to high risk dementia patients reduces cognitive decline by up to 50% so I think your question is misguided.
- gregatragenet3 3y agoHow about this, people who experience hearing loss are more likely to have a /diagnosis/ of dementia? Because hearing loss causes them to underperform on the verbally administered evals. My father in law got a dementia diagnosis, after this my wife and I started going with him to his appointments - and discovered why he had such a diagnosis. He's the type of person who'll nod and pretend to hear/understand when he doesn't. We know this just from our interactions with him. The tool they use to eval is verbal question/answer and he did much better on the evals when we were with him and keyed the doctor in on that they ensure he hears the question or they give it to him in written form.