Age-related hearing loss can have diverse impacts across your overall life. Besides your ability to hear, your professional life, your social life, and even your mental clarity can also be affected. Over time, hearing loss can profoundly impact the way your brain works in ways that immediately impact your mood, your memory, and more.
Sometimes, the relationship between hearing loss and cognition is subtle. People normally don’t associate their memory problems, for instance, with hearing loss even though it’s one of the first symptoms. The sad reality is that hearing loss and memory loss go hand-in-hand.
What’s the connection between memory and hearing loss? Well, hearing loss puts a unique strain on your brain and that’s, at least to some extent, the connection. Your mental abilities will normally improve when you manage your hearing loss.
How memory is Affected by hearing loss
Hearing loss can be difficult to notice. It’s not uncommon for people to miss the more subtle and early signs. For these individuals hearing loss might only become noticeable once it has become moderate or severe. In part, that’s because hearing loss tends to progress rather gradually. It’s commonly easy to ignore symptoms and, essentially, turn up the volume on your television a little more every few days (or weeks).
Additionally, the human brain is very good at compensating for periodic loss of sounds. As a result, you may not notice that people are harder to understand. The positive thing about this is that your daily life will have fewer interruptions. However, compensating like this requires considerable brain power. Requiring your brain to work at this level for long durations can result in:
- Memory loss or forgetfulness
- Chronic fatigue
- Unexplained irritability
If you’re having these symptoms, we’ll be able to tell you whether the underlying cause is hearing loss or not. In instances where hearing loss is present, we’ll work with you to establish a treatment plan.
Can memory issues be the result of hearing loss?
Obviously, your brain can be affected by hearing loss in other ways besides mental exhaustion. Forgetfulness is a prevalent symptom. This is particularly true of untreated hearing loss. The cause and effect relationship is not fully understood, but it’s obvious that there is a link between hearing loss and the following problems:
- Increased risk of depression and anxiety: Research has shown that untreated hearing loss can also lead to increases in both depression and anxiety over time. Again, this risk has been shown to drop when the underlying hearing loss is successfully managed.
- Social isolation: People with untreated hearing loss will often begin to isolate themselves from other people. You’ll go out less often, chat with the cashier at the supermarket less, and so on. Over time, this kind of isolation can change the way your brain is functioning.
- Increased risk of dementia: People who have untreated hearing loss have been known to exhibit an increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline. This risk drops considerably when the hearing loss is treated and managed.
These issues aren’t unrelated, of course. Mental health problems, including depression, can be worsened by social isolation. And your risk of dementia also goes up with social solitude.
Does hearing loss cause mental decline?
Your risk of cognitive decline and dementia is increased by untreated hearing loss, and that’s one of the more serious outcomes of neglecting your hearing problems. It’s quite clear that management of the symptoms helps substantially and scientists have a number of theories as to why. In other words, treating your hearing loss has been shown to slow cognitive decline and lower your risk of developing dementia later in life.
How to handle your forgetfulness (and hearing loss)
The good news is, treating neglected hearing loss, if your forgetfulness is caused by hearing loss, will definitely help. Here are a number of things we may suggest if hearing loss is identified:
- Regular screenings: Before any issues begin to happen, routine screenings can detect them. Cognitive strain can be avoided with early treatment.
- The use of hearing aids: You will hear better with the use of a hearing aid. This can result in less strain on your mental abilities and an improvement in your social scenario. By preventing and reducing social isolation, your cognition can improve, decreasing your risk of dementia, depression, and other problems.
- Hearing protection: Some of the mental decline previously discussed can be avoided and further damage can be minimized by using hearing protection.
You don’t need to remain forgetful!
If hearing loss is causing you to be a little forgetful, it’s worthwhile to emphasize that it doesn’t need to remain that way. In many cases, cognitive functions will return once your brain doesn’t need to strain so hard. When you hear better, your brain doesn’t need to work so hard, and that rest can do a world of good.
Make an appointment with us so that we can help you significantly improve your outlook and decrease your risk of other issues.
