Study shows risk of dementia in older people with hearing loss could be reduced with hearing aid use

A large team of medical researchers affiliated with several Danish institutions analyzed data from a national health information database and found that hearing aids could reduce the risk of developing dementia in older people with hearing loss. Their study is published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery.

Previous research has suggested that there may be a link between hearing difficulties in older adults and the development of dementia, suggesting that progressive hearing loss could be a risk factor for developing one of several types of dementia. Scientists are still trying to better understand the link, but in the meantime, some in the field are beginning to wonder whether the use of hearing aids could slow or stop the onset of such diseases.

To learn more about this possibility, the research team turned to the Hearing Examinations in Southern Denmark database which, as the name suggests, is a database that monitors hearing problems in people living in southern Denmark. It contains hearing data for approximately 573,088 people aged 50 and over and was collected between 2003 and 2017.

By analyzing the data, the researchers looked for associations between hearing loss and dementia. They found that older adults with hearing loss who did not use hearing aids were 20% more likely to develop dementia than those without hearing loss. They also found that older people with hearing loss who used a hearing aid had only a 6% chance of developing dementia, which was close to the average for people without hearing loss.

The researchers emphasize that their results do not prove that hearing aid use can prevent the onset of dementia, just that more studies need to be done to find out if this is the case.

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