HEARING
Difficulty hearing speech could be a risk factor for dementia, according to new studies.
HEARING IMPAIRMENT AFFECTS around 1.5 billion individuals worldw ide, and if you’re hard of hearing, you may be at a higher risk of dementia. A study published in 2021 and led by University of Oxford researchers looked at 82,000 participants over age 60, finding that difficulty hearing spoken conversations is associated with up to a 91 per cent increase in dementia risk.
‘Dementia affects millions of individuals worldw ide, with the number of cases projected to treble in the next few decades. However, there is growing evidence that developing dementia is not inevitable and that the risk could be reduced by treating pre-existing conditions,’ says Dr Thomas Littlejohns, senior epidemiologist at the Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH), and senior author of the study.
A major component of hearing impairment is difficulty hearing speech in noisy env ironments – also called speech-in-noise (SiN) hearing impairment. This can have a large impact on the day-to-day functioning of people affected, who can struggle to follow conversations or hear announcements in noisy environments. However, until now it was unclear whether difficulty hearing speech-in-noise was associated with developing dementia. The abovementioned study, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, showed how over an 11-year follow-up of men and women from the UK Biobank study, 1,285 participants developed dementia. Those who had been classified as having “insufficient” or “poor” speech-innoise hearing were associated with a 61 and 91 per cent increased risk, respectively, of developing dementia, compared to a normal level of speech-in-noise hearing.
TOO NOISY TO HEAR
‘Difficulty hearing speech in backg round noise is one of the most common problems for people with age-related hearing impairme
