Hearing aids can help prevent dementia, says study – 21/04/2023 – Health

Study points to hearing aids as a possible minimally invasive and cost-effective treatment to reduce the risk of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. UK researchers may have discovered a relatively simple and inexpensive way to prevent dementia: hearing aids.

According to a study published in the journal The Lancet earlier this month, people with hearing impairments who don’t wear braces have a higher risk of developing dementia than people with normal hearing.

Both the risk of dementia and hearing loss increase with age. According to the publication, by 2050, it is estimated that 150 million people worldwide will be affected by dementia.

Hearing loss, a major risk factor for dementia

Hearing loss is associated with 8% of cases of dementia globally, making it the single biggest modifiable risk factor for dementia, according to a study published in the JAMA Network medical journal.

The authors of the new paper published in The Lancet agree, describing hearing aids as a minimally invasive and cost-effective treatment to reduce the risk of dementia.

For the study, scientists analyzed data from nearly 440,000 people from the UK Biobank, a UK database that contains biomedical information on around half a million people. About a quarter of these people had a hearing impairment, but only 11.4% of them wore a hearing aid.

Hearing aid wearers had no greater risk of any type of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, compared with those with normal hearing. However, the risk of dementia increased by 42% for those with hearing impairment who did not use the device.

The researchers also examined whether factors such as loneliness, social isolation or depressive symptoms could have an impact on the correlation between hearing loss and dementia. Eventual improvements in the individuals’ psychological and social situations had, however, little effect on the connection between dementia and hearing loss, which is why the researchers suspect that it must be the hearing aid itself that offers some form of protection.

Other possible factors

As this is a purely observational study, the researchers are unaware of potential underlying neurological mechanisms that could explain the link between hearing loss and dementia.

It is also possible that the connection could be explained by other factors. For example, perhaps people who wear a hearing aid pay more attention to their overall health, thereby ensuring a lower risk of dementia for many reasons not necessarily associated with their hearing aid.

On the other hand, this isn’t the first study to find a link between hearing aid use and a reduced risk of dementia.

Regardless, one thing seems clear: wearing a hearing aid probably doesn’t hurt.