What Are The Best Hearing Aids For Dementia
For patients living with both dementia, hearing loss should never be ignored, as it may exacerbate dementia symptoms, increase their disorientation and make their environment less safe .
While there are no hearing products made specifically for dementia patients, there are plenty of devices out there that can still be helpful. They range from the relatively simple, such as a wearable microphone to premium hearing aids.
Hearing loss makes living with diseases like Alzheimer’s even more challenging. For people currently affected by dementia, hearing aids or other hearing devices are recommended to improve their quality of life and make communication easier.
If you are the caretaker of someone with Alzheimer’s or a similar disease that affects cognition, you are wise to investigate what hearing devices might work best. A hearing care provider will be your ally in this journey, as they’ll know the latest products that may work for your loved one. You’ll also be able to discuss your loved one’s specific needs, habits and abilities with the hearing care specialist.
For example, hearing aids may not always be the best solution. Most premium hearing aids are designed to be discreet, so they may be too small and too easy to lose for a patient with dementia, especially if they have dexterity problems. Hearing aids also require that a person remember to keep the batteries fresh and the device clean and in good working condition. Instead, assistive listening devices may work better.
Watch For Signs Of Infection
A middle ear infection is the most common cause of hearing loss in kids. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 75 percent of children experience at least one before they turn 3. When ear infections recur, they can cause damage to the eardrum, bones, or hearing nerve and may lead to permanent hearing loss.
Watch for ear pulling or scratching, fatigue, irritability, and lack of attention. Older kids with hearing loss may misunderstand your words or consistently turn the volume of the TV up. Call your doctor if you see any signs. Ear infections should be treated promptly, Kim said.
The Cocktail Party Effect
Most previous studies have focused on our ability to detect sounds, but a new area of research focuses on the cocktail party effect. This is the challenge people have focussing on a single speaker or conversation in a noisy environment. Alzheimers Research UK is working with the RNID and Prof Jason Warrens team at University College London to investigate whether this could be an early warning sign for dementia.
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Wearing Hearing Aids Means Im Old And Im Not Ready For That
Its normal to feel worried that hearing loss means youre agingand to want to hide it. Plenty of people with a hearing impairment sit silently rather than joining in conversations and activities, because they fear that hearing problems will make them seem helpless or less than competent. The truth: Connecting with others can help your brain stay younger and keep you involved with life.
How Does Your Hearing Affect Dementia Risk
In 2020, a study reviewing risk factors for dementia suggested people with unaddressed midlife hearing loss may be up to five times more likely to have the condition than those without hearing loss.
With around 1 million people affected by dementia in the UK, and 12 million people estimated to have a type of hearing loss, its never been more important to understand this link.
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Hearing Loss Puts A Cognitive Burden On Other Processes
Someone with hearing loss may use more of their cognitive resources or energy to make sense of what they hear. This reduces the resources available for other cognitive processes, such as memory, language processing, and attention.
The effort of trying to make sense of speech, particularly in noisy environments, may lead to a decline in other brain functions, which is characteristic of people with dementia.
Mechanism : Increased Cognitive Resources Needed For Listening
A third mechanism is based on the idea that people with hearing impairment use greater cognitive resources for listening, making these resources unavailable for other aspects of higher cognition when they are âoccupiedâ during listening. âResourcesâ refers here to the means for cognitive tasks such as attention , working memory , or language processing . There is debate about how cognitive resources are allocated, and the corresponding neural bases. With respect to working memory, for example, there is a question about the extent to which resources may be specifically allocated to objects or represent a distributed resource . Further debate concerns the extent to which working memory resources reflect neuronal or synaptic mechanisms, or both . What is important here, however, is that there is a fixed capacity for many general cognitive operations. These resources may be absorbed when listening becomes challenging, reducing their availability for other aspects of cognition.
Mechanisms 2 and 3 may at first appear at odds: in mechanism 2, the problem is the decreased stimulation of auditory cognitive networks, while in mechanism 3, there is increased stimulation. The critical difference is that mechanism 2 leads to changes in neuronal mechanisms and brain structure before the onset of dementia, causing an increased risk of subsequent dementia, while mechanism 3 is based on changes in brain activity during dementia that may explain the cognitive deficits.
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Coping With Dementia And Hearing Loss
Living with both conditions is more difficult than living with either on its own. Both dementia and hearing loss can have an impact on how someone copes day to day for example, making it harder to communicate. They can also both lead to increased social isolation, loss of independence, and problems with everyday activities, and as a result make the persons dementia seem worse.
However, there are things that can help.
- Having regular hearing checks and making the most of the hearing the person does have for example, by using hearing aids.
- Improving the environment, for example by reducing background noise and distractions and making sure the area is well lit.
- Finding out the persons preferred way of communicating for example, lip reading.
- Using gestures and expressions, and letting people see your face when communicating.
- Using visual clues and prompts.
If the person needs hearing aids, these are available free on the NHS, or you can buy one privately. Many older people struggle to use a hearing aid correctly all the time. It can take time for a person to get used to a hearing aid, and it will take a person with dementia longer. It is also important to consider whether a hearing aid is the best option an audiologist should be able to advise.
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When To Contact A Doctor
People who notice hearing loss or tinnitus should consult a doctor. Audiologists can help diagnose and treat hearing loss.
A doctor or audiologist can help people with hearing loss prevent further damage. In addition, audiologists can help people manage hearing loss by recommending hearing aids or other treatments.
Consulting a doctor or audiologist to learn about prevention strategies can help reduce the risk of high frequency hearing loss, particularly for people who work in noisy environments.
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Dementia A Real Risk With Hearing Loss
If you think of hearing loss as just an inconsequential part of getting older, youre not alone.
The truth is, however, that the condition can strike even the youngest among us more than one in 1,000 babies screened has some form of hearing impairment, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data and it can trigger other health problems, too.
Take cognitive decline, for example, which can lead to Alzheimers disease or another form of dementia. Research has long pointed to links between hearing loss and reduced brain functioning over time, but the statistics may surprise you.
Consider these startling findings:
- On average, seniors with hearing loss experience significantly reduced cognitive function 3.2 years before their normal-hearing counterparts.
- Hearing-impaired seniors experience thinking and memory problems 30 to 40 percent faster than their normal-hearing counterparts.
- Older adults with a hearing disability may lose over a cubic centimeter of brain tissue annually beyond normal shrinkage.
- Those with hearing loss are two, three, or nearly five times as likely to develop dementia, depending on the severity of the hearing impairment.
So whats the connection between hearing impairment and cognitive decline? Its not completely clear how hearing loss, which is also associated with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other common public-health challenges, contributes to development of dementia.
Munch to Better Hearing
Impaired Social Interaction May Affect Brain Function
People with hearing loss receive degraded auditory input from their environment. When socializing, they may miss out on verbal and emotional information, which is crucial in social interaction. The loss of this vital information may directly impair brain structure and function.
According to the authors, reduced social interactions are as much of a risk factor for dementia as smoking and inactivity.
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What About Tinnitus And Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s disease is slightly more common among people who have tinnitus than people who don’t, at least one study has indicated. In that study, conducted in Taiwan, 3.1% of tinnitus patients developed Alzheimer’s over a 10-year period, compared to 2% of those who did not have tinnitus. However, scientists do not know why this relationship exists, and more research is needed.
When To See A Healthcare Provider
It’s essential to have regular check-ups with your healthcare provider to monitor your physical and mental health.
If you find that you are having trouble understanding the people around you, or it seems like people are mumbling their words, you should make an appointment to check your hearing.
You may need to see your healthcare provider for a referral to an audiologist or otolaryngologist . They can perform a hearing test and assess the type and severity of hearing loss.
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S To Take If Youre Struggling With Hearing Loss
If you often ask, What? or struggle to keep up with dialogue, consider it a problem and seek help.
Make an appointment with an audiologist who will help to determine why youre not hearing well. It may be related to an illness or even a prescribed medication.
Complete all necessary tests and follow the doctors orders.
If a doctor diagnoses hearing loss, or expects it to worsen, dont get stuck in the mire of denial.
An act as simple as wearing a tiny hearing aid can not only help with your hearing loss, but potentially combat dementia symptoms and thwart brain atrophy. Consistently wear your hearing aids as prescribed.
Note: Alzheimers News Today is strictly a news and information website about the disease. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website. The opinions expressed in this column are not those of Alzheimers News Today or its parent company, BioNews, and are intended to spark discussion about issues pertaining to Alzheimers disease.
Ways To Improve Your Brain Health
As you age, whether you have hearing loss or not, your cognitive abilities tend to have a natural decline. Fortunately, there are things you can do to reduce the severity of the decline and make small improvements along the way.
1. Keep your mind active
You can keep learning throughout your life no matter how far you went in school. Studies show a lower risk of dementia if your level of education is high school or better. But studies also show that if you can maintain an 8th-grade level of reading or literacy throughout your life, it will help keep your mind stay active, says Dr. Factora. You can also engage in hobbies that help keep you learning or challenged.
You may enjoy playing board games, ballroom dancing, playing a musical instrument or learning a foreign language. Any new activity that forces you to learn and increase your skill over time develops new neural connections in your brain.
These healthy new neural connections may help you bypass any damage to the brain associated with dementia or Alzheimers disease, Dr. Factora explains.
2. Maintain a good social network
Social connections help keep your brain healthy as you age. So its important to maintain good relationships with friends and family.
If youre constantly engaged in a give-and-take conversation and are around a lot of people, that stimulation will have a positive effect on your brain health, encourages Dr. Factora.
3. Exercise regularly
4. Stick to a Mediterranean diet
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The Auditory Brain: Structural And Functional Substrates For Neurodegeneration
The auditory system has evolved to allow adaptive behavioural responses to complex, dynamic acoustic environments . However, its structural and functional characteristics confer specific vulnerabilities to neurodegenerative pathologies.
Anatomically, the hierarchy of auditory processing relays and in particular the large-scale cerebral networks that process sound information are highly distributed. The spread of pathogenic proteins in neurodegenerative dementias targets these networks rather than the peripheral organs of hearing. Though histopathological data remain limited, neurodegenerative pathologies may preferentially involve auditory association cortex and cortico-cortical projections rather than primary sensory cortex , thereby striking the integrative mechanisms that are most critical for auditory object analysis.
Two additional, related guiding principles of auditory system operation that are critical for adaptive functioning in complex, dynamic auditory environments are functional plasticity and reciprocity. Reciprocity is mediated by recursive, afferent-efferent feedback that supports auditory change detection and top-down tracking of behaviourally relevant sound sources , as well as predictive decoding and filling-in of ambiguous and varying auditory inputs, such as degraded speech . Plasticity enables dynamic neural adaptation to auditory experience.
Model Appropriate Listening Volumes For Your Kids
When using any electronics, choose the lowest volume where you can still listen and hear the words, said Dr. S. Daniel Ganjian, a pediatrician at Providence Saint Johns Health Center in Santa Monica, California. As a general rule of thumb, if others can hear sounds coming from your headphones, its too loud.
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What Research On Dementia And Hearing Loss Reveals
Most recently, a study published in July 2021 found that people who struggle to hear speech in noise were more likely to develop dementia than those with normal hearing, as measured over an 11-year period. This was the first time that speech in noise was specifically studied. However, the study wasn’t capable of determining if untreated hearing loss caused the dementia, only that they’re linked.
In a different study, a team at Johns Hopkins looked at cognitive impairment scores over six years for nearly 2,000 seniors. They concluded that those with hearing loss had a faster decline. The volunteers were all cognitively normal when the research began. But by the studys end, people with hearing loss were 24 percent more likely to meet the standard of cognitive impairment compared to people with normal hearing.
Another approach is to ask people whether theyve noticed a change. Measures of subjective decline can pick up losses before theyll show up on a test. A large studyusing data drawn from more than 10,000 men age 62 and upran over eight years. It found that the greater their hearing loss, the more likely men were to express concerns about their memory or thinking over time. With even a mild hearing loss, their chance of reporting cognitive decline was 30 percent higher than among those who did not report any hearing loss. With moderate or severe hearing loss, the risk was 42 and 52 percent higher.
More: Slight hearing loss linked to cognitive decline in new study
Risk Factors To Be Aware Of
When it comes to hearing loss and its risk factor for dementia, its a good idea to understand what exactly can link one to the other. It is believed that the loss of hearing causes some changes in the brain that then mean that dementia can become a risk. This is often down to brain shrinkage as a result of the inactivity of the part of the brain that works with hearing. At the same time, a loss of hearing can also mean that the brain goes into overdrive which strains it, and it can reduce the capacity of functions like memory and thought.
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How Hearing Loss May Change The Brain
Hearing loss does seem to shrink some parts of the brain responsible for auditory response. In a study led by Jonathan Peelle, now at Washington University in St. Louis, older adults underwent brain scans while they listened to sentences of varying complexity. They also took tests that measured gray matter, the regions of the brain involved in muscle control, and sensory perception such as seeing and hearing, memory, emotions, speech, decision making, and self-control.
It turned out that the neurons in people with hearing loss were less active when they focused on complex sentences. They also had less gray matter in the auditory areas. These effects may accumulate with time or be triggered by age: In other research, Peelle found that older adults with hearing loss do worse on speech comprehension tasks than younger adults with hearing loss.
The Link Between The Two
Research that has been conducted into hearing loss and dementia shows that there is a connection between the two and that those with hearing loss are more likely to develop dementia. It can even be the case that those that have mild hearing loss can be twice as likely to develop dementia, those with moderate are three times as likely and severe hearing loss takes it to five times as likely.
Because of this, its a good idea to check and see if you do have hearing loss. An experienced audiologist can help you with this and assess your hearing.
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