East End Hearing Blog

Do you have hearing loss? If so, do you sometimes find that it seems like work just to understand what the people around you are saying? You are not alone. The feeling that listening and understanding is taxing work is common among individuals with hearing loss – even the ones that use hearing aids.

As though that wasn’t bad news enough, it might not be just your ability to hear that is affected, but also cognitive functions. Contemporary research studies have established that there is a solid association between hearing loss and your risk of contracting dementia and Alzheimer’s.

One such study was conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on 639 individuals between the ages of 36 and 90 16-year period. The data showed that 58 study volunteers – 9% of the total – had developed dementia and 37 – 6 percent of the total – had developed Alzheimer’s disease. Investigators found that for every ten decibels of hearing loss, the participants’ odds of developing dementia went up by 20 percent; the more significant the degree of hearing loss, the higher their chance of dementia.

In a similar research study, surveying 1,984 participants, investigators found a similar connection between dementia and hearing loss, but they also found that the hearing-impaired experienced noticeable decreases in their cognitive functions. Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those with hearing impairment developed memory loss 40 percent faster. In both studies, a far more dismaying finding was that this association was not lessened by using hearing aids.

Scientists have proposed several hypotheses to explain the association between hearing loss and loss of cognitive capabilities. One explanation is associated with the question at the beginning of this article, and has been given the name cognitive overload. Some researchers suspect that if you are hearing impaired, your brain tires itself just trying to hear that it has a diminished capacity to understand what is being said. The resulting lack of comprehension can cause social isolation, a factor that has been shown in other studies to cause dementia. Another theory is that neither dementia nor hearing loss cause the other, but that they’re both related to an as-yet-undiscovered pathological mechanism – possibly vascular, possibly genetic, possibly environmental – which causes both.

Even though these study outcomes are a little dismaying, there is hope to be found in them. If you wear hearing aids, visit your audiologist regularly to keep them fitted, adjusted, and programmed correctly, so that you are not straining to hear. The less work used in the mechanics of hearing, the more brain capacity available for comprehension. And, if it turns out that loss of hearing is an early indicator of dementia, detecting the hearing loss early might allow for early intervention to postpone the advancement.

A common question from patients concerns being able to hear in crowded rooms. They report that they don’t seem to have any problem hearing people and understanding what they say when they are speaking to them one-on-one, or even in small groups. Not so in crowded situations. Whether in large public space outdoors such as a football game or indoors at a party, they report being unable to distinguish the speakers’ voice over the background noise. This is true even when the speaker is close by and addressing them directly. People who complain of this also often mention having trouble hearing the consonants “S,” “F,” and “H,” no longer being able to distinguish one from the other.

If you are experiencing these symptoms, there is a possibility that you may have suffered some form or high-frequency hearing loss. When describing human speech, audiologists define the 3000 to 8000 Hz range as high-frequency. This is the range that the F, S, and H sounds typically fall into. In a crowded situation there are many sounds across the frequency spectrum competing with one another. Much of the background noise – such as people dancing or walking – occurs at lower frequencies. Speech is layered on top of this in the higher frequency ranges. Individuals with high-frequency hearing loss will report that the low-frequency sounds are much louder to them. To them it is as if the ‘background noise’ has been amplified relative to the human speech they are trying to focus on.

At least 18 percent of the population suffers from some form of high-frequency hearing loss. The most common cause of this is aging, but in recent years audiologists have found increasing numbers of teenagers and young adults suffering from it, possibly as a result of listening to overly loud music. High-frequency hearing loss can also be the result of diabetes, a side affect of certain prescription drugs or genetic factors.

The important thing to remember is that if you have suffered some degree of high-frequency hearing loss, it can be effectively treated. Hearing aids can be adjusted to amplify the higher frequencies and suppress lower frequencies, with the result that you can hear voices better in crowded rooms.

Before we get too far into treatment options, it is critical that you have a proper diagnosis. To find out if high-frequency hearing loss is the root cause behind your difficulty hearing in crowds, call and make a first appointment. There are other causes for this, and our specialists can perform tests to determine whether the cause in your case really is hearing loss, and if so, treat it.