Hear for Life Hearing Aid Centers - The best hearing aid sales, fitting, service and repair provider in Fresno CA. See us for hearing tests, hearing aid repair, batteries, and accessories. Great reviews. Hear for Life Hearing Aid Centers explains the connections of Hearing Loss, Dementia and Decline in Cognitive Function.

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Uncovering the Relationships Between Hearing Loss, Dementia
and Decline in Cognitive Function
For those of you who have suffered some type of hearing loss, do you ever
find yourself having to work really hard to understand what is being said to
you or around you? You aren’t alone. The sense that listening and
understanding is tiring work is common among people with hearing loss –
even the ones that wear hearing aids.
Unfortunately, the fallout of this phenomenon may not be restricted to hearing
loss; it may also be related to loss
of cognitive abilities. Hearing loss
substantially raises your risk of
contracting Alzheimer’s or dementia
according to recent research
studies.
A 16-year research study of this
connection from the Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine included 639
participants between the ages of 36
and 90. The data indicated that 58 study volunteers – 9 percent of the total –
had developed dementia and 37 – 6 percent – had developed Alzheimer’s.
Researchers found that for every ten decibels of hearing loss, the participants’
odds of developing dementia went up by 20%; the more significant the hearing
loss, the higher their risk of dementia.
In a similar research study, evaluating 1,984 participants, scientists observed
a similar connection between hearing loss and dementia, but they also noted
that the hearing-impaired suffered noticeable declines in their cognitive
functions. The hearing-impaired participants developed reduced thinking

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capacity and memory loss 40 percent faster than individuals with normal
hearing. In each of the two studies, an even more dismaying finding was that
this relationship was not lessened by using hearing aids.
Investigators have suggested several hypotheses to explain the association
between loss of hearing and loss of cognitive capabilities. Researchers have
coined the term cognitive overload in association with one particular theory.
The theory is that among the hearing-impaired, the brain exhausts itself so
much working to hear that it can’t concentrate on the meaning of the sounds
that it is hearing. The ensuing lack of understanding can cause social isolation,
a factor that has been shown in other studies to cause dementia. Another
theory is that neither dementia nor hearing loss cause the other, but that
they’re both linked to an as-yet-undiscovered pathological mechanism –
possibly vascular, possibly genetic, possibly environmental – that causes both.
However dismal these study results may sound, there are things to be learned
from them. If you use hearing aids, visit your audiologist on a regular basis to
keep them fitted, adjusted, and programmed correctly, so that you are not
constantly straining to hear. If you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you
have greater cognitive capacity to comprehend what is being said, and
remember it. Also, if the two conditions are connected, early detection of
hearing impairment might eventually lead to interventions that could prevent
dementia.