Hearing loss linked to dementia

[Muse]

NYTimes article on the subject.

For Better Brain Health, Preserve Your Hearing (Published 2019)

Hearing loss is the largest modifiable risk factor for developing dementia, exceeding that of smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and social isolation.

www.nytimes.com

[I'd do the linkage thing if it weren't broken here in Anandtech Forums... most of the time it screws up the rest of the message... when will this be fixed??? It's been many many weeks now...]

The article itself is quite good, the 400+ comments are better. In fact I'd call them fantastic. One in particular I want to quote:


Gunther Ruckl
Decatur, GAJan. 4
@Burwell Having spent the first half of my life in Europe and now, at 73, am able to look back and compare how population health is maintained both sides of the Atlantic I have only one recommendation for Americans: Vote for a presidential candidate in support of 'Improved Medicare for All'. In most, if not all of Europe, every aspect of health is covered by insurance. Needless to say, that includes hearing evaluation and aids. Most importantly, all people get the full gamut of healthcare, at statistically half the price per person per year compared to healthcare in the US. It is stunning that a rich country like the US is so backwards on so many social parameters yet can afford trillions to invest in unjust, neocolonialist wars. There is so much more to say but, unfortunately, this is not the place to do it [I am a retired MD, PhD, trained in Germany and retrained at Brown and Harvard.]

 

[JEDIYoda]

huh???? What did you say??

 

[Muse]

I confess, I have to do that more than a lot of people. I'm considering hearing aids. It's just people talking in noisy environments that I have trouble with. Oh, and a lot of movies, TBH. Rewind and subtitles are my fall back sometimes. Maybe hearing aids would help a lot with that. They are a YMMV thing, so who knows?

 

[Ichinisan]

I wouldn't take this at face value. It's possible that the brain disorder affects comprehension, which would often seem to be a hearing impairment. I honestly think I'm experiencing deteriorating mental capacity. I find that I often hear someone say something clearly, but I just can't figure out what they tried to say. The syllables don't sound like proper words. Sometimes it suddenly clicks and I realize what was said, but often I ask someone to repeat multiple times and I still can't figure it out.

 

[Muse]

The whole hearing, dementia, Alzheimers, longevity, fitness, mental alertness thing is, well, complicated! I figure that exercise is a major factor, absolutely. My dad did a lot of crossword puzzles. I'm crap at them, probably because I don't do them. I've seen it said that they can help! Learning new things helps! I think artistic pursuits of various kinds help.

Again, the 400+ comments to the article provide a lot more than the article. Well, it would take you 20x the time to read them, so...

 

[Thump553]

As someone who attended a LOT of concerts at ear-bleeding volume levels in my besotted youth plus Alzheimer's is nearly universal on my mother's side, I'm doomed.

Time to take up a dangerous hobby I guess.

 

[Lanyap]

I confess, I have to do that more than a lot of people. I'm considering hearing aids. It's just people talking in noisy environments that I have trouble with. Oh, and a lot of movies, TBH. Rewind and subtitles are my fall back sometimes. Maybe hearing aids would help a lot with that. They are a YMMV thing, so who knows?

Same here. My hearing is getting progressively worse over the years. I can't keep up with the fast paced movies like superheroes, etc. If I cup my ears it helps sometimes, LOL. I need hearing aids but don't know what kind to get. Here in Florida there is a hearing aid place on every street corner.

 

[Greenman]

I wouldn't take this at face value. It's possible that the brain disorder affects comprehension, which would often seem to be a hearing impairment. I honestly think I'm experiencing deteriorating mental capacity. I find that I often hear someone say something clearly, but I just can't figure out what they tried to say. The syllables don't sound like proper words. Sometimes it suddenly clicks and I realize what was said, but often I ask someone to repeat multiple times and I still can't figure it out.

That can be hearing loss. I was recently retested for new hearing aids, as my old ones weren't doing the job. My hearing loss overall hadn't progressed at all, but my speech comprehension went from 94% five years ago to 64% today. New hearing aids helped with that a lot. The technology has improved considerably in the last five years while the cost has gone down nearly 50%.

 

[Greenman]

Same here. My hearing is getting progressively worse over the years. I can't keep up with the fast paced movies like superheroes, etc. If I cup my ears it helps sometimes, LOL. I need hearing aids but don't know what kind to get. Here in Florida there is a hearing aid place on every street corner.

Costco. The number one supplier of hearing aids in the US.

 

[Muse]

Same here. My hearing is getting progressively worse over the years. I can't keep up with the fast paced movies like superheroes, etc. If I cup my ears it helps sometimes, LOL. I need hearing aids but don't know what kind to get. Here in Florida there is a hearing aid place on every street corner.

Me thinks try to get really really high recommendations for a particular audiologist. See someone who really cares about YOU! Conscientious, great service is paramount.

 

[woolfe9998]

I have to wonder about causation here. Is hearing loss causing cognitive decline, or is brain deterioration causing both cognitive decline and hearing loss? The author doesn't seem terribly on the ball either:

Memory is adversely affected as well. Information that is not heard clearly impairs the brain’s ability to remember it.

If you don't remember something because you didn't hear it right, that is a hearing issue, not a memory issue at all. Duh.

 

[Muse]

I have to wonder about causation here. Is hearing loss causing cognitive decline, or is brain deterioration causing both cognitive decline and hearing loss? The author doesn't seem terribly on the ball either:



If you don't remember something because you didn't hear it right, that is a hearing issue, not a memory issue at all. Duh.

Yeah, I had to reread that sentence when I first saw it. Didn't make a lot of sense. I think she didn't express herself clearly there. As noted on one of the comments to the article, the health articles in the NYTimes are often relatively inferior. That's not to say this is a terrible article, but could have been better. The comments, like I say, are very interesting. Reader comments to NYT articles tend to be really high quality. A lot of really intelligent people read that publication.

 

[Vic]

I wouldn't take this at face value. It's possible that the brain disorder affects comprehension, which would often seem to be a hearing impairment. I honestly think I'm experiencing deteriorating mental capacity. I find that I often hear someone say something clearly, but I just can't figure out what they tried to say. The syllables don't sound like proper words. Sometimes it suddenly clicks and I realize what was said, but often I ask someone to repeat multiple times and I still can't figure it out.

This is most likely hearing loss. I developed the same issue a few years ago. The reason I found out is due to the way hearing loss generally occurs and the way our brains work. Hearing loss does not develop as a loss of overall hearing leading to a reduction in volume, as is commonly believed (and I used to believe), but as the (more or less) complete loss of many narrow ranges of frequencies. Thus the nerve signals transmitted from our ears to our brains are incomplete, with missing bits of data, forcing our brains to work harder to compile more difficult arrangements of sounds, such as speech, into something recognizable to our conscious minds.

 

[Muse]

This is most likely hearing loss. I developed the same issue a few years ago. The reason I found out is due to the way hearing loss generally occurs and the way our brains work. Hearing loss does not develop as a loss of overall hearing leading to a reduction in volume, as is commonly believed (and I used to believe), but as the (more or less) complete loss of many narrow ranges of frequencies. Thus the nerve signals transmitted from our ears to our brains are incomplete, with missing bits of data, forcing our brains to work harder to compile more difficult arrangements of sounds, such as speech, into something recognizable to our conscious minds.

Yeah, I think that's right. I hear, I don't have a sense that my auditory experience is getting quieter at all. In fact I get into environments where I am all but overwhelmed by the intensity, the volume. But I have a harder time understanding speech in a lot of environments than the other people there. How to explain that? I'm not getting some of the auditory experience they're getting. It has to be certain frequencies. The words aren't registering, well, not enough of them so I can follow the conversations sometimes. It's really unfortunate. Maybe this can be improved a lot with hearing aids. But there are a lot of hearing aids available and, I'm told, they can be tuned or adjusted. I'm going to try not to rush into it. I know a guy who's pleased with what he has. He's no dummy. He told me what he got:

Starkey 3 Series i20 RIC Digital

Might not be appropriate for me, but I'm going to look into it. He's had them 5 years.

Edit: A search reveals that they aren't available at Amazon right now, so probably outdated. 5 years is a long time in the hearing aid arena. They probably have better ones now.

 

[dawp]

I have a hard time hearing sometimes but I think that is due to too many loud clubs

 

[fskimospy]

I have to wonder about causation here. Is hearing loss causing cognitive decline, or is brain deterioration causing both cognitive decline and hearing loss? The author doesn't seem terribly on the ball either:

If you don't remember something because you didn't hear it right, that is a hearing issue, not a memory issue at all. Duh.

What you say makes sense and I really hope you’re right. Chemo damaged my hearing to the point where I generally can’t understand people if there’s significant background noise so hearing loss leading to dementia is a pretty scary result to me.

Also apparently this board is filled with a bunch of deaf motherfuckers, haha.

 

[TheVrolok]

I have to wonder about causation here. Is hearing loss causing cognitive decline, or is brain deterioration causing both cognitive decline and hearing loss? The author doesn't seem terribly on the ball either:



If you don't remember something because you didn't hear it right, that is a hearing issue, not a memory issue at all. Duh.

The current scientific opinion is that hearing loss is ("may be") and independent risk factor for dementia, not that dementia causes hearing loss.

Of course dementia is often used as a fairly broad term, and there are certainly conditions that could damage the brain in ways that cause both but, generally, the typical "dementia conditions" don't, in and of themselves, cause hearing loss.

 

[TheVrolok]

What you say makes sense and I really hope you’re right. Chemo damaged my hearing to the point where I generally can’t understand people if there’s significant background noise so hearing loss leading to dementia is a pretty scary result to me.

Also apparently this board is filled with a bunch of deaf motherfuckers, haha.

It's like many things in life, it's a risk factor but by no means determinative. Age is a risk factor, and there's not much you can do about that one. Certainly I appreciate the frustration around "avoidable" or "modifiable" risk factors, but at this point the best you can do is make sure you (or anyone, myself included with a ton of AD in my family) work on what risks you can affect.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

What you say? You have no chance to survive make your time.

 

[Muse]

I have a hard time hearing sometimes but I think that is due to too many loud clubs

For me that's for sure... mostly in the 1980's. I wised up at one point and would use ear protection, primitive stuff like a wad of a cotton ball. I just bought a pair of Etymotic ear protection devices for around $12, haven't arrived yet. I have constant ringing in my ears. My doctor told me he's never heard of someone recovering from that kind of auditory nerve damage. I think it's worse if I don't get enough sleep or am stressed. Sometimes it's quieter. It's high pitched and there seem to be at least 2 frequencies I hear. I don't think about it most of the time, of course (thankfully).

 

[Muse]

What you say? You have no chance to survive make your time.

I see people signing on trains. They often seem pretty energetic compared to the people surrounding them. It's not a death sentence not hearing.

I had a conversation with a friend about blindness versus deafness, saying it would be worse to be deaf. She totally disagreed. That was many decades ago.

That's the kind of conversation that sticks with you. My thinking was, well, if you're blind you live in your own world but that world can be full and wonderful. You have music! That's huge. However, you have a hard time dealing with movement through the world. There are people who do fantastically even though blind in dealing with that. It doesn't have to get you down. Deaf people, well, unless they are Beethoven, their musical experience is impacted to say the least. Of course, there's more to hearing than music. And there's more to blindness than having difficulty not bumping into things or getting hit by a car. Dunno, to me it's a conundrum.

 

[woolfe9998]

The current scientific opinion is that hearing loss is ("may be") and independent risk factor for dementia, not that dementia causes hearing loss.

Of course dementia is often used as a fairly broad term, and there are certainly conditions that could damage the brain in ways that cause both but, generally, the typical "dementia conditions" don't, in and of themselves, cause hearing loss.

According to that article, slight hearing loss accounts for most of the correlation with dementia. Well guess what, almost everyone over 50 has "slight hearing loss." Also, slight hearing loss doesn't cause the "social isolation" which is being posited as a reason for the correlation with dementia. It just doesn't make that much sense. Might not be the science that is the problem here, just the article describing it. Because it doesn't make any sense to me.

 

[hal2kilo]

NYTimes article on the subject.

For Better Brain Health, Preserve Your Hearing (Published 2019)

Hearing loss is the largest modifiable risk factor for developing dementia, exceeding that of smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and social isolation.

www.nytimes.com

[I'd do the linkage thing if it weren't broken here in Anandtech Forums... most of the time it screws up the rest of the message... when will this be fixed??? It's been many many weeks now...]

The article itself is quite good, the 400+ comments are better. In fact I'd call them fantastic. One in particular I want to quote:


Gunther Ruckl
Decatur, GAJan. 4
@Burwell Having spent the first half of my life in Europe and now, at 73, am able to look back and compare how population health is maintained both sides of the Atlantic I have only one recommendation for Americans: Vote for a presidential candidate in support of 'Improved Medicare for All'. In most, if not all of Europe, every aspect of health is covered by insurance. Needless to say, that includes hearing evaluation and aids. Most importantly, all people get the full gamut of healthcare, at statistically half the price per person per year compared to healthcare in the US. It is stunning that a rich country like the US is so backwards on so many social parameters yet can afford trillions to invest in unjust, neocolonialist wars. There is so much more to say but, unfortunately, this is not the place to do it [I am a retired MD, PhD, trained in Germany and retrained at Brown and Harvard.]

Well at least you don't have to have prescription to get taken to the cleaners for 5 grand worth of hearing aids anymore. They can now be purchased online. Who knows maybe one day we can do the is this better or that better ourselves with eye glasses one day.