Hearing aids may reduce risk of dementia by nearly 50%, study finds
For people facing a greater threat of cognitive decline, getting hearing aids could cut your risk in half, according to a new study.
Cognitive decline is a reduction in abilities that can range from mild impairment to dementia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and dementia is a big problem across the globe.
"As everyone lives longer, the number of people with dementia over time are going up," said co-principal investigator of the study Dr. Frank Lin, professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Over the past decade, research has established that hearing loss is one of the biggest risk factors for developing dementia, but it wasn't clear whether intervening with hearing aids would reduce the risk, he added.
But the study published Tuesday in the Lancet was the first randomized control study to investigate this question, Lin said.
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The researchers looked at more than 3,000 people from two populations: healthy community volunteers and older adults from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, a longstanding observational study of cardiovascular health.
Participants were randomly assigned to either a control group that received counselling in chronic disease prevention or an intervention group that received treatment from an audiologist and hearing aids, according to the study. Researchers followed up with the groups every six months for three years, and at the end, they were given a score from a comprehensive neurocognitive test.
In the total group, hearing aids did not appear to reduce cognitive decline, the study said. But when researchers looked at just the older group that was at higher risk, they found a significant reduction in cognitive decline, Lin said.
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"That was very impressive to see that in the unhealthy individuals they were able to slow the rate of cognitive decline by 48%," said Dr. Thomas Holland, physician scientist at the Rush Institute for Health Aging. Holland was not involved in the study.
The smaller change over the total population could be because if the healthy, less at-risk participants weren't seeing cognitive decline much at all, then the hearing aids couldn't do much to slow it down, he added.
NOTE: Video is from October 2022.
