Treating Hearing Loss Can Help Reduce Your Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease

What does hearing ability have to do with your cognition? Among the many risk factors that have been identified for dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, untreated hearing loss has a strong relationship with higher rates. 

Dr. Frank Lin at Johns Hopkins University is one of the leading scholars addressing this connection. He and his team have found in many research studies that those who have untreated hearing loss have much higher rates of cognitive decline, including dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. They have also discovered that for those who develop Alzheimer’s, the rate of decline is faster among those who have untreated hearing loss than their counterparts. What are we to make of this information? Although there is no known way to prevent or cure Alzheimer’s, getting a hearing test might be a way to reduce your risk. 

There are many research efforts underway that seek to better understand the link between hearing loss and cognitive conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease. The best thing you can do for yourself to reduce the risk: get a hearing test. 

A hearing test is the first step toward treatment for those who need it, and getting treatment is a way to reduce your risk for the disease, as well. Let’s take a closer look at this connection between Alzheimer’s and hearing loss, imagining the mind of a person who struggles to communicate. That process appears to be the key link between Alzheimer’s and hearing loss, explaining why those who let their hearing loss go untreated have so much higher risk for dementia.  

Communication and Cognition

Our minds are constantly receiving sensory stimuli from the world, and the brain is a complex computer tasked with processing all of those stimuli, turning it into meaningful thoughts, and determining an appropriate course of action. In addition to the other sensory systems of vision, touch, smell, and taste, our sense of hearing is closely connected to language. The brain uses language to sort and categorize information into useful units of meaning. When hearing ability is intact, that communication process flows easily from sound to complex meaning and subsequent action. However, those with untreated hearing loss are faced with a conundrum. Rather than a steady stream of sounds that are recognizable as words, phrases, and sentences, the world sounds like a jumble of random sounds, phonemes, and syllables. Those sounds no longer fit together in an arrangement that makes sense, so the mind goes into overdrive. Much like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces, the brain scrambles to form some picture on the spot. 

Conversations are particularly difficult, because the other person expects a response quite quickly. A complex and confusing guess-and-check process of improvisation ensues, and it’s no wonder that those who have untreated hearing loss are fatigued in conversations, tending to check out altogether. This complex process of meaning creation explains what we see in brain imaging among those who have even mild hearing loss. 

Rather than processing in the auditory cortex and passing along information to the parts of the brain devoted to complex thought, those regions are recruited to the simple task of sound processing. Without the resources to engage in complex thought, experts suspect that dementia can be caused by that scarcity of mental resources. 

Seeking Treatment for Hearing Loss

If you know someone with untreated hearing loss, this information can serve as a wake-up call. Rather than allowing the mind to suffer cognitive decline, you can support healthy communication through treatment for hearing loss. When hearing aids are used consistently and thoroughly, the risk of dementia is significantly reduced. 

Why not take this opportunity to have a conversation with the person in your life who has untreated hearing loss? When you have that conversation, your gentle encouragement might be all that is needed to help secure treatment, improve communication, and prevent dementia. The time is now to make an appointment for a hearing test!