A new study suggests treating hearing loss with hearing aids might reduce the risk of developing dementia by up to 19%.
The large-scale research by scientists at the National University of Singapore ‘adds
to the growing evidence of a link between hearing loss and cognitive impairment’, noted medicalnewstoday.com.
In the study, published in the journal JAMA Neurology, the researchers examined whether ‘hearing aids and cochlear implants decrease the risk of subsequent cognitive decline in individuals with hearing loss.’
Their ‘systematic review and multi-adjusted observational meta-analysis including 137,484 participants’ found the ‘use of hearing restorative devices was associated with a 19% decrease in hazards of long-term cognitive decline such as incident dementia over a duration ranging from 2-25 years’.
For the research, an initial 3,243 studies were screened, before 31 studies (25 observational studies, 6 trials) with the 137,484 participants were included, of which 19 studies (15 observational studies, 4 trials) were included in quantitative analyses.
In addition, meta-analysis of 8 studies with 126,903 participants and a follow-up duration ranging from 2-25 years which specifically studied long-term associations between hearing aid use and cognitive decline ‘showed significantly lower hazards of any cognitive decline among hearing aid users compared with participants with uncorrected hearing loss’.
The researchers reported usage of these devices ‘was also significantly associated with a 3% improvement in cognitive test scores that assessed general cognition in the short term’.
That conclusion followed meta-analysis of 11 studies with 568 participants studying the association between hearing restoration and short-term cognitive test score changes which ‘revealed a 3% improvement in short- term cognitive test scores after the use of hearing aids’. The researchers advocated ‘physicians should strongly encourage their patients with hearing loss to adopt such devices’.
