Hearing aids reduce cognitive decline for people at
“If you use adverts to
risk of dementia
Wearing a hearing aid didn't reduce the rate of
cognitive decline among a group of older people
when compared with just receiving general health
advice, but it did have an effect when the
researchers focused on those who are particularly at
risk of dementia
By David Cox
25 July 2023
Hearing aids could mitigate cognitive decline in
older adults, but only in those who are particularly
at risk of developing dementia.
Researchers have long speculated that
hearing loss may raise the risk of
dementia among older people, possibly by
making them more socially isolated or by directly
affecting regions of the brain that are involved in
memory.
However, this was largely based
on observational research that suggested a
correlation between hearing loss and
dementia, rather than work showing that the
former causes the latter. It could be that people
with dementia are less able to arrange hearing
check-ups or remember to wear hearing aids.
Now, Frank Lin at Johns Hopkins University in
Maryland and his colleagues have conducted a
randomised control trial that directly compared the
effects of wearing and not wearing a hearing aid
on cognitive decline.
Out of 977 US adults aged between 70 and 84
with similar levels of hearing loss, around half
were given hearing aids to wear daily, while the
rest just received general health advice. None of
the participants showed signs of significant
cognitive impairment at the start of the study.
Three years later, there were no differences
between the two groups when tested on their logic
skills, word fluency, memory and decision
making.
The lack of a difference may be because 739 of
the participants were volunteers who were already
in generally good health and signed up to the trial
after seeing it advertised.
find people, it tends to be the people with more
initiative and resources who take part, and they’re
the ones who are already less vulnerable to
cognitive decline,” says Gill Livingston at
University College London.
The remaining 238 people were asked to take part
after already being enrolled in a trial investigating
the causes of atherosclerosis, thickening or
hardening of the arteries due to plaque build-up.
All of these participants had various heart-related
risk factors, putting them in worse health than the
other 739 volunteers.
These participants also tended to be older women
who lived alone, had a lower income and had a
less educated background, and they also had
higher rates of diabetes and blood pressure – all
of which have been linked to dementia.
Within this group, 120 of the participants wore
hearing aids and 118 only received the health
advice. When the researchers focused on these
individuals, they found that those who wore a
hearing aid experienced 48 per cent
less cognitive decline over the three years, when
assessed via the same tests.
“This is interesting because it gives us a clearer
idea of the population who we should intervene
in,” says Livingston. “You don’t intervene in
everyone, you intervene in the people where you
might make a difference, at least in the short
term.”
If the results are confirmed with further research,
hearing aids may be a relatively simple,
inexpensive way of tackling
rising dementia rates. “Having a hearing aid is
not like an intravenous injection,” says
Livingston. “It doesn’t have either the cost or the
likely side effects.”
Julia Sarant at the University of Melbourne,
Australia, says that seeing a result like this in a
randomised controlled trial could raise awareness
of the importance of addressing hearing
impairments.
“That evidence will hopefully spur people to use
hearing aids,” she says. “It’s well known that, on
average, most people wait seven to 10 years to
seek help with their hearing and around 80 per
cent of people who could benefit don’t use them.”