Hearing aids may cut risk of cognitive decline by nearly half

This adds to compounding evidence that cognitive decline (including dementia and Alzheimer) is significantly delayed by mental stimulation.<p>Hearing is just part of it.

Mental stimulation is discussed here in the comments, and that makes sense, but I wonder if social connection could be a factor as well.<p>Loneliness and disconnection with others seems correlated with all kinds of declines. If you can&#x27;t hear people it&#x27;s very hard to participate, which could make you more disconnected.<p>I read that hearing aids might be deregulated soon, which might mean lower prices and more innovation there.

I have pretty bad hearing loss, I&#x27;m &quot;insured&quot;, but after insurance my prescription hearing aids would cost me 12k. I guess I&#x27;ll add dementia to my bucket list

How do deaf people play into this? I know they use sign language to communicate but what about all the other stimulation they miss like being able to hear radio, tv, music, random conversations, etc.

my father has had hearing loss for over two decades now, slowly starting in his early forties. it&#x27;s so bad now in his early 60s that it&#x27;s almost impossible to have a conversation with him. he&#x27;s also been laid off of his tech job a couple of years ago and has retreated into isolation with his dogs. my mother thankfully still exists in his life but his cognitive decline is so noticeable it&#x27;s extremely sad. he misunderstands everything, and english as a second language has made his life in the USA that much more difficult. it&#x27;s quite insane the difference between him now and him even 10 years ago when he had a job and somewhat of a community.<p>he&#x27;s bought some hearing aids but it doesn&#x27;t help that he&#x27;s a cheap person and spent a grand total of ~90$ on them from some random store (amazon?) so suffice to say they do almost nothing aside from make high pitched sounds. I&#x27;ve told him to go to the doctor to buy something a bit more advanced, really look into it, but he won&#x27;t and i think his decision making is part of the cognitive decline. he simply doesn&#x27;t seem to care anymore. if it were up to me i would buy him some really amazing ones, but he won&#x27;t even go to the doctor to seek help to diagnose what type of hearing loss he has so it&#x27;d be a waste of money.<p>i&#x27;ve had this theory that his hearing loss is isolating him so much that it&#x27;s affecting his ability to think, so i am not surprised at all by this study

Would this suggest that having background noise on in your home (e.g. music, TV, podcast, etc.) is beneficial?<p>Our home is generally pretty quiet. I occasionally listen to music, but we only have the TV on when we&#x27;re actually watching something (which isn&#x27;t often).<p>Compared to growing up (and even still today) my Mom would leave live TV on constantly in the background.<p>Obviously we still have mental stimulation through work, cooking, board games, reading, etc., but not much audio (aside from conversing and the occasional video game&#x2F;TV show).

Is this a correlation-&gt;causation thing, where people who experience significant hearing loss also experience dementia more than healthier people who have healthy ears and healthy brains?

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I wear them for tinnitus. But with having ADHD hearing all the background noise so sharp is actually not helping.

Man, I read that wrong

Yet another worthless study proving nothing. Why do we keep funding these? Either show causation of don&#x27;t bother publishing.