Let’s be clear: there are a few ways that you can preserve your mental acuteness and fend off conditions like cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Social engagement and involvement in the workforce are among the most notable. Regardless of the method, though, managing hearing loss through hearing aids makes these activities much easier and contributes in its own way to battling cognitive issues.
These conditions, according to many studies, are frequently directly connected to hearing loss. This article will lay out the connection between cognitive decline and hearing loss and how wearing hearing aids can minimize the probability of these conditions becoming an imminent problem.
The Relationship Between Hearing Loss And Cognitive Decline
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have conducted numerous studies over the years to analyze the connection between hearing loss and cognitive decline. The same story was told by each study: cognitive decline was more prevalent with people who experience hearing loss. Actually, one study demonstrated that people with hearing loss were 24% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than people with healthy hearing.
Hearing loss by itself does not cause dementia, but there is a connection between the two conditions. The primary theories indicate that your brain must work overtime when you can’t effectively process sounds. That means that tasks like memory and cognition, which require more energy, can’t function efficiently because your brain has to use so much of that energy on more basic tasks.
Hearing loss can also have a significant impact on your mental health. Anxiety, depression, and social isolation have all been associated with hearing loss and there may even be a connection with schizophrenia. All of these conditions also produce cognitive decline – as noted above, one of the best ways to maintain your mental sharpness is to remain socially active. In many cases, hearing loss causes people to feel self-conscious out in public, which means they’ll turn to isolation instead. The mental issues mentioned above are typically the outcome of the lack of human contact and can ultimately lead to significant cognitive decline.
How a Hearing Aid Can Help You Safeguard Your Mental Faculties
Hearing aids are possibly one of the best tools we have to maintain mental sharpness and combat disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The problem is that only one out of seven of the millions of people 50 or older who suffer from hearing impairment actually use a hearing aid. It may be a stigma or a previous bad experience that keeps people from hearing aids, but the fact is that they are proven to help people hear better and retain their cognitive functions for longer periods of time.
There are circumstances where specific sounds will have to be relearned because they’ve been forgotten after extended hearing damage. It’s essential to help your brain get back to processing more important tasks and hearing aids can do just that by stopping this problem in the first place and helping you relearn any sounds the brain has forgotten.
Get in touch with us today to find out what options are available to help you begin hearing better in this decade and beyond.