If you start talking about dementia at your next family get-together, you will most likely put a dark cloud over the whole event.
The topic of dementia can be very scary and most individuals aren’t going to go out of their way to discuss it. A degenerative mental disease in which you gradually (or, more frighteningly, quickly) lose your mental faculties, dementia forces you to lose touch with reality, experience mood swings, and have memory problems. It’s not something anybody looks forward to.
So stopping or at least slowing dementia is a priority for many individuals. There are several clear connections, as it turns out, between dementia and untreated hearing loss.
You might be surprised by that. After all, what does your brain have to do with your ears (a lot, it turns out)? Why are the dangers of dementia multiplied with hearing loss?
When you ignore hearing loss, what are the repercussions?
You recognize that you’re beginning to lose your hearing, but it isn’t at the top of your list of worries. It’s nothing that cranking up the volume on your tv won’t fix, right? Maybe, when you watch your favorite program, you’ll just turn on the captions.
Or maybe your hearing loss has gone undetected so far. Perhaps the signs are still easy to disregard. In either case, hearing loss and cognitive decline have a powerful correlation. That could have something to do with what happens when you have untreated hearing loss.
- Conversation becomes more difficult to understand. You could begin to keep yourself secluded from others as a result of this. You might become distant from loved ones and friends. You speak to others less. This type of social isolation is, well, not good for your brain. And naturally your social life. Additionally, many individuals who cope with hearing loss-related social isolation don’t even realize it’s happening, and they probably won’t connect their isolation to their hearing.
- Your brain will begin to work much harder. Your ears will get less audio information when you’re dealing with untreated hearing loss. This will leave your brain filling in the missing info. This will really tire your brain out. The current theory is, when this happens, your brain draws power from your thought and memory centers. The idea is that over time this contributes to dementia (or, at least, helps it along). Your brain working so hard can also result in all manner of other symptoms, such as mental fatigue and tiredness.
So your hearing impairment is not quite as innocuous as you might have suspected.
One of the leading indicators of dementia is hearing loss
Maybe your hearing loss is mild. Like, you can’t hear whispers, but everything else sounds just fine. Well, turns out you’re still two times as likely to get dementia as somebody who does not have hearing loss.
Meaning that even minor hearing loss is a fairly good preliminary sign of a dementia risk.
So… How should we interpret this?
Well, it’s important not to forget that we’re dealing with risk here. Hearing loss isn’t a guarantee of dementia or even an early symptom of dementia. It does mean that later in life you will have an increased risk of developing cognitive decline. But there may be an upside.
Your risk of cognitive decline is decreased by successfully managing your hearing loss. So how do you manage your hearing loss? Here are several ways:
- Come see us so we can help you identify any hearing loss you may have.
- You can take some steps to protect your hearing from further harm if you catch your hearing loss soon enough. You could, for instance, wear ear protection if you work in a noisy setting and steer clear of noisy events such as concerts or sporting events.
- The impact of hearing loss can be decreased by using hearing aids. So, can cognitive decline be stopped by wearing hearing aids? That’s hard to say, but hearing aids can improve brain function. Here’s the reason why: You’ll be capable of participating in more discussions, your brain won’t have to work as hard, and you’ll be a little more socially connected. Research suggests that managing hearing loss can help reduce your risk of developing dementia in the future. It won’t stop dementia but we can still call it a win.
Other ways to lower your dementia risk
Of course, there are other things you can do to decrease your chance of cognitive decline, too. Here are some examples:
- Eating a healthy diet, especially one that helps you keep your blood pressure from getting too high. Sometimes, medication can help here, some individuals just have naturally higher blood pressure; those individuals could need medication sooner than later.
- Stop smoking. Seriously. It just makes everything bad, including your chance of experiencing dementia (this list also includes drinking too much alcohol).
- Exercise is needed for good general health including hearing health.
- Getting adequate sleep at night is crucial. Some research links a higher risk of dementia to getting less than four hours of sleep every night.
The connection between lifestyle, hearing loss, and dementia is still being examined by scientists. There are so many causes that make this disease so complex. But the lower your risk, the better.
Being able to hear is its own advantage
So, over time, hearing better will reduce your overall risk of dementia. You’ll be bettering your life now, not just in the future. Imagine, no more missed discussions, no more muffled misunderstandings, no more silent and lonely visits to the grocery store.
It’s no fun losing out on life’s important moments. And taking steps to manage your hearing loss, maybe by using hearing aids, can be really helpful.
So call us today for an appointment.
References
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/hearing-loss-and-the-dementia-connection
