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Having trouble hearing in a noisy environment?

You are at increased risk for dementia

A huge study has found a link between difficulty hearing speech in an environment with background noise and a double risk of developing dementia later in life.

The good news is that there is something to be done to prevent this.

Listen carefully

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• dementia

• hearing

• Alzheimer's

Walla!

health

Sunday, 01 August 2021, 07:36 Updated: 08:53

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Hearing is an ability that most of us take for granted.

But maybe we should start paying a little better attention to it - new research suggests that adults should monitor for slight changes in their hearing, because certain hearing difficulties can indicate an increased risk of developing dementia at an older age.

The study involved more than 80,000 adults aged 60 and older, and the researchers found that those who had difficulty hearing other people talking in noisy places (with a lot of background noise) were at higher risk of developing dementia.

Dementia is a roof definition under which a variety of diseases and medical conditions are protected that are characterized by memory loss and difficulties in language functions and additional thinking skills.

His findings were published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association.

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To the full article

Hearing loss can be an early sign of dementia and a warning light for patients and caregivers.

A man has difficulty understanding his interlocutor (Photo: ShutterStock)

The findings also have a positive side: The current study joins further scientific evidence to support that hearing problems are not only a symptom of dementia, but a risk factor for the disease, which can serve as a warning light for patients, their families or their treating physicians, and allow them to receive treatments before That the disease is beginning to progress.

"Recently there has been a unique interest in hearing loss and the question of whether it affects the chances of dementia," said epidemiologist and research author Thomas Littlegons of Oxford University.

"Although preliminary, our findings suggest that difficulty hearing in a noisy environment may be an effective goal in efforts to prevent the development of dementia," he explained.

Hearing loss is one of the nine significant and preventable risk factors for dementia as early as 2017, along with smoking and lack of exercise and more.

The same study that listed the risk factors, published in the journal Lancet and considered a milestone in the field, was updated in 2020 and three more risk factors were added to the list, so that it now had 12 items.

The risk is reversible?

The keywords in this list are "preventable": All 12 risk factors on the list are lifestyle-related and can be changed or improved so that overall health metrics will improve and the risk for various health conditions will decrease.

In the same studies in the Lancet, the researchers estimated that out of a dozen risk factors on the list, hearing loss probably has the heaviest weight on the risk of developing dementia.

According to their estimates, middle-aged people who suffered from untreated hearing loss had a 5 times higher risk of developing dementia later in life.

Hearing loss may be a preliminary sign that will allow for early intervention, before the disease worsens. Dementia (Photo: ShutterStock)

To get into the thick of it, researchers at Oxford University have decided to turn to the UK Biobank database to help researchers and doctors identify links between genetics, environmental factors and health outcomes in a broad sample of the UK population. The researchers analyzed the risk of dementia in a group of 82,000 men and women aged 60 and over who did not have a diagnosis of dementia and a test that assessed their hearing status was performed on them at the beginning of the study.

One of the indicators examined by the researchers is the ability of the subjects to hear speech in a noisy environment, which is actually the ability to distinguish speech segments against the background of other distracting noises. Subjects had to hear numbers played to them against the background of "white noise."

Eleven years after the start of the study, 1,285 of the participants were diagnosed with dementia, according to their medical records. "Participants who had the worst hearing in the tests we conducted had a double chance of dementia compared to those whose hearing was normal," LittleJones said.

People are unaware of their hearing loss

Another interesting finding of the study was that close to half of the subjects whose hearing skills were found to be impaired in the speech hearing test in a noisy environment, testified that they themselves did not feel they had hearing problems.

The researchers also tried to test whether the hearing impairments found in some of the subjects were related to other factors that are known to have some effect on the risk of dementia, such as social isolation or depression (two factors that may also affect people's quality of hearing).

Protecting your ears from hearing damage may have a positive effect on your risk.

Works with headphones (Photo: ShutterStock)

"We have found very little evidence to that effect," denied LittleJones investigator.

But to be sure, he and his team performed a number of comparisons of the data to make sure there was no case of reverse causality here - meaning that in fact undiagnosed dementia is what causes people to suffer from a higher rate of hearing loss, and not the other way around.

No evidence was found for this either.

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The current study is not the first to link hearing problems and an increased risk of dementia, but the researchers say it is the first to investigate the link between dementia and impaired hearing ability in a noisy environment, a more common hearing ability in daily life.

Past studies of large population samples conducted in Australia and Taiwan have also found an increased risk of dementia in people with hearing problems.

Previous studies, however, have been based on participants' self-reports or with references to hearing loss in medical records.

The advantage of the present study is that it is based on objective tests performed on all participants.

"In studies of this kind it is important to remember that causality cannot be inferred from them," LittleJones pointed out, "but our findings join the existing scientific literature that hearing impairments can be a changeable target that reduces the risk of dementia in old age."

At the same time, another point to be made from the study - protecting the ears from hearing damage by using noise-canceling headphones, gaskets, etc., as well as hearing aid interventions such as hearing aids, can reduce the potential risk of dementia later in life.

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