Do you know the most effective way to prevent dementia?

June is Alzheimer’s and brain awareness month.

As Audiologists, the brain is just as important as the ears we treat- they are directly involved with one another to be exact. While many people think we hear with just our ears, there is more to it than that. Hearing involves teamwork between your ears and your brain. Hearing begins within the ears, but it is the auditory nerve that converts sound waves into nerve impulses that travel to your brain. Your brain interprets the sound so you “hear” it as birds chirping, a voice or music. All told, hearing is an amazing process that happens in a split second.

In my book, Isolation is Optional, we cover the research behind the relationship of hearing loss and dementia. Several key research studies have pointed to the potential links of hearing loss and dementia, including the work from Dr. Lin and his colleagues at John Hopkins Medical Center that indicate hearing loss can increase the risk of dementia by 200-500%.

Did you know that June is Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month? Every year, the Alzheimer’s Association of America dedicates this month to raising awareness about the disease, and to provide support to the millions of people around the world affected by it. So what is Alzheimer’s and dementia, and how can hearing loss come into play with brain health?

Dementia is a general term used to describe the loss of cognitive functioning, thinking, remembering and reasoning- things that can interfere with a person’s daily activities. Alzheimer’s Disease is a common type of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. Symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease can include, but not limited to, memory loss that disrupts daily life, difficulty handling bills, difficulty completing tasks that are familiar, decreased judgment, changes in mood, and/or misplacing things. In 2020, approximately 5.8 million Americans were living with Alzheimer’s Disease (cdc.gov), and rates are thought to increase due to the increase in social isolation from COVID19.

You can think of the brain as a muscle. Just like any other muscle, the more the brain is exercised the stronger it becomes. When someone has a hearing loss, everyday sounds are not being processed in the brain as strongly as they were before. This lack of acoustic cues to the auditory parts of the brain causes auditory deprivation (which is the lack of sound processing in the brain). Research has shown that with untreated hearing loss, patients show a greater risk of brain atrophy and shrinkage in the areas responsible for processing speech. If the brain is not being exercised as it should, we start to see neural rewiring and possible changes in cognitive health.

Did you know...

Dr. Shawna Beasley has congenital hearing loss? She was born with her hearing loss and now wears two Cochlear implants. Because Dr. Beasley was born with a congenital hearing loss, there was a higher than average chance that Kennedy could have been born with hearing loss too.

Colorado was the first state to require newborn hearing screenings back in 1999 and is responsible for the early identification of countless childhood hearing losses. And the great news is that Kennedy passed her newborn hearing screening!