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Hearing aids might be an important tool in the effort to prevent cognitive decline and dementia, according to a new study.

Research has established that hearing loss in an important risk factor in developing dementia, but whether intervening with the hearing loss will also treat the progression of cognitive decline has been less clear, said senior study author Woei Shyang Loh, Head of Otolaryngology at the National University Hospital and National University of Singapore.

The new study published Monday in JAMA Neurology offers evidence that managing hearing loss may potentially help reduce or delay cognitive decline, Loh said.

A metanalysis of 3,243 studies, both observational and trials, the research looked at the association between hearing loss and cognitive decline over a range of durations, from two to 25 years. The review found that people with hearing loss who wore devices to help performed 3% better on cognitive scores in the short term, according to the study.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/12/05/health/hearing-loss-dementia-study-wellness

I just hope they help with this damn tinnitus. I’ve heard they can do wonders making things go quiet.

They do, so long as whichever hearing device you get as tinnitus management support. The big manufacturers like Phonak and Oticon all come with some tinnitus support in their devices.

That being said, even without the noise therapy/tinnitus management, wearing the devices ensures the auditory nerve is receiving adequate stimulation across all speech frequencies. Tinnitus often arises as a result of hearing loss (but not always), but in those cases by ensuring you are hearing all frequencies at an adequate level, the brain can start re-wiring back to how it was before the auditory deprivation kicked in and the brain had to start hype-rtuning itself to compensate for the lack of input arriving from the nerve.

the hearing dept at my local VA will issue hearing aids for tinnitus, but they don't make it quiet.

what they do is Bluetooth to your phone and stream music at just above the tinnitus level. there's no way to make it stop, but playing music sure helps to cover it up.

it's not 100%, but it's still a big relief

Thanks for this! Gave me a bit more hope than I’ve had in a long time on this topic.

My Mum refuses to wear hers… uses a myriad of excuses. She’s 80 and I can see the effects of cognitive decline from not being able to communicate properly with here closest ones … it’s so frustrating

Interestingly, what lead us to having to put my grandmother in a retirement home was she became convinced her neighbour (older than her, and far less mobile) was plotting to steal from her. She heard them talking at night, conspiring, through the shared wall of their town home. She can’t hear you talking to her 10 feet away. But through the wall? But It was bizarre, she never made these kinds of claims and, she was adamant. So much so, my dad got her place swept, they investigated, because it was so out of the blue. Nothing. Finally it reached a point, something is wrong, and mom brought her to the hospital. She was getting dementia and was given medications.

Overtime, she needed less, and things stabilized, because - she got way better hearing aides. Turns out, while she was getting dementia, her hearing was also getting worse and the hearing aides weren’t working correctly, and to fill in the blanks, her brain decided to try and make sense of the noises it was hearing. It turned various sounds and, maybe muffled speech, into voices and words. Completely fabricating “conversations” she could her “through the wall.”

Even now, she’s much better, but you can tel instantly when her hearing aides aren’t functioning correctly. She is very withdrawn, seems easily confused about normal stuff, like what day it is, what time it is, etc. Help her get them working properly, and she’s completely different.

I'm 25, and I don't know much about the neurological in this example, but when I'm really high, I sometimes think I hear music playing (claasical or rock both of which I don't listen to on my own) when it's actually a wind breeze or pipes in the building. Deciphering the source of the sound and then remarking that the music oddly resembles said sound makes me realize that my brain was filling the gap of something faintly audible.

It is incredibly interesting how sometimes I could hear extremely well crafted tracks. Although I have no musical training at all, the subconscious seems super creative but also very, very convincing, I have zero doubt your grandmother 110% believed what she was saying having been caught off guard myself truly thinking there's no way I'm not hearing a neighbor's music and that it's actually me taking a random sound pattern I was ignoring and seemingly turning it into "proper music".

My grandfather was in a retirement home. Pretty active, we visited him frequently.

Well once Covid hit we couldn’t see him in person, and my family decided to pull him out and care for him at our home. On the zoom call prior to pulling him out he seemed so lost and confused and could barely respond to what we were asking him. I honestly thought he wasn’t going to last the month.

After we brought him home, he had a general family zoom call planned. I gave him my headphones to wear, and suddenly he was chatting and laughing and bantering and his sharp wit was right back to normal. His hearing aids weren’t working properly and he just couldn’t understand what was going on. It’s such a huge barrier for connection and engagement when you can’t hear or understand what’s going on around you. I’m happy to see hearing aid advertising targeting younger people too and trying to remove some stigma surrounding them.

I think we can all agree that someone scratching their nails across a blackboard is an extremely annoying sound that you do not want to listen to for more than a few seconds.

Now imagine on the other hand that there was someone also standing in the classroom playing a beautiful piece of music on a violin or guitar or piano so that you couldn’t hear the screeching from the blackboard. That’s how hearing aids help with Tinnitus. They don’t eliminate the Tinnitus but they help you hear other sounds and give the brain other auditory inputs to process which in turn help “mask” the noise from the Tinnitus.

Either way, hearing aids can greatly help your Tinnitus so you should go check them out.

Something I read once that still explains me trying to hear others when they talk.

This is a quote from a forum where people are talking about hearing aids and is one of the best descriptions of what I go through just to talk to others I've ever found. It's a doctor telling a mom what her 13 year old daughter is going to experience from congenital hearing loss.

"(Hearing) people use selective inattention and decide casually what to tune out. But your daughter has to use selective attention. She has to constantly decide when to listen and then devote energy to doing so. It's an exhausting process that requires both physical and cognitive concentration. When you see two men talking while leaning on a fence and looking at a mule, you hear the conversation and choose to ignore them or not. She has to process the scene, decide if it's important, cognitively evaluate context to decide they might be talking about the mule, then apply all that to decode the sounds she hears."

If they are talking fast I'm not going understand it. Hearing aids or no.

I was given some "aids" that were supposed to negate my tinnitus by emitted sounds that would nullify the tinnitus. (I know I've the terminology wrong)

What I got were two sounds. They never did make it work.

I'm guessing things are TOO LOUD. When I first got aids I was sitting on our deck with my wife in the Spring. I noticed the birds were loud. Annoyingly loud. I mentioned it to her and she said they weren't any louder than normal, I just hadn't heard them for so long I forgot. Over time I got used to the increase in volume.

They may not be comfortable. My first pair hurt my ears. I now have Phonak with the rubber "bulb" and once in I don't feel them.

The first indication they were working was a quarter I got in change. I shook the change to settle it before putting it in my pocket and heard a high pitched sound. It took me a bit to figure out I hadn't heard the sound of a quarter in years.