Key Points
According to a study published in The Lancet earlier this month, people with hearing impairments who don't use a hearing aid have a higher risk of developing dementia than people with normal hearing...
The researchers of the new study agree, describing hearing aids as a minimally invasive and cost-effective treatment to reduce the risk of dementia...
But improvements in individual psychological and social situations had little effect on the connection between dementia and hearing loss, which is why the researchers suspect that it must be the hearing aid itself that offers some form of protection...
As this is a purely observational study, researchers are unaware of the potential underlying neurological mechanisms that could explain the link between hearing loss and dementia...
For example: maybe people who use a hearing aid pay more attention to their health overall, keeping them at a lower risk of dementia for many reasons not necessarily associated with their hearing aid...
