Make no mistake: there are a number of ways that you can maintain your mental acuteness and stave off conditions such as dementia, cognitive decline, and Alzheimer’s disease. Staying socially active is one of the most important while engaging in the workforce appears to be another. Whichever methods you employ to combat cognitive decline, however, keeping your hearing strong and wearing hearing aids if you need them will be tremendously helpful.
These conditions, according to many studies, are often directly connected to hearing loss. This article will outline the relationship between cognitive decline and hearing loss and how using hearing aids can reduce the likelihood of these conditions becoming an impending problem.
How Hearing Loss Contributes to Cognitive Decline
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have conducted several studies over the years to determine the link between cognitive decline and hearing loss. The same story was revealed by each study: individuals with hearing loss experienced dementia and cognitive decline in higher rates than those without. One study revealed, in fact, that there was a 24% higher instance of Alzheimer’s in individuals who have impaired hearing.
Hearing loss alone does not cause dementia, but there is a connection between the two conditions. The primary theories suggest that your brain must work overtime when you can’t properly process sounds. That means that activities such as memory and cognition, which require more energy, can’t function at full capacity because your brain has to use so much of that energy on more simple tasks.
Your mental health can also be significantly impacted by hearing loss. Research has shown that hearing loss is connected to depression, social isolation, anxiety, and may even influence schizophrenia. All of these disorders also lead to cognitive decline – as noted above, one of the best ways to preserve your mental sharpness is to stay socially engaged. In many examples, hearing loss causes individuals to feel self-conscious around others, which means they’ll turn to isolation instead. The mental issues listed above are frequently the outcome of the lack of human interaction and can inevitably lead to significant cognitive decline.
How a Hearing Aid Can Help You Keep Your Resolution
Hearing aids are possibly one of the best tools we have to preserve mental sharpness and fight conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The issue is that only one out of seven of the millions of people over the age of 50 who deal with hearing loss actually wear a hearing aid. It may be a stigma or a previous bad experience that keeps people using hearing aids, but in fact, hearing aids have been proven to help people preserve their cognitive function by helping them hear better.
There are circumstances where particular sounds will need to be relearned because they’ve been forgotten after prolonged hearing damage. A hearing aid can either stop that scenario from happening in the first place or help you relearn those sounds, which will allow your brain to focus on other, more essential tasks.
Get in touch with us today to learn what options are available to help you begin hearing better in this decade and beyond.
