Your Audiology Tutorial: Hearing Loss and Cognition

You may have been reading about the link between hearing loss and cognitive decline.  Lately more has been disclosed/conjectured about the link between them.  Not just in your everyday periodical.  Lin and colleagues reported in Archives in Neurology that the risk of dementia and untreated hearing loss is twice as likely with mild loss, three times with moderate loss, and five times with severe loss.

With time, more will be learned.  For now, while amplification has been shown in numerous international studies to slow down cognitive decline, it is important to note that the pathways that explain the connection between hearing loss and cognitive function are not entirely clear.  Also, we cannot definitively state that hearing loss causes dementia or the use of hearing aids prevent it.

Take home: get your hearing tested.  Establish this baseline and follow up annually, especially if you are over forty.  Stimulation of the auditory cortex will likely strengthen neural function.