Hearing Loss, Cognitive and Psychosocial Health

Hearing Loss,

Cognitive and Psychosocial Health

You may think that hearing loss doesn’t affect your health, except for your actual hearing. But an untreated hearing loss could have more effects than you think, particularly for your mental health, leading to seclusion and social isolation. The advanced technology of modern hearing aids can compensate for hearing loss and benefit the wearer on a cognitive, social, and emotional level. The impact on quality of life varies from individual to individual. It can be caused by several factors, which wearing hearing aids addresses.

Cognitive Load

When you constantly strain to hear and understand, the brain gets stressed out. Wearing hearing aids stimulates the auditory system by compensating for hearing loss, which decreases its stress level. In addition, some hearing aids include sound processing algorithms capable of distinguishing speech from ambient noise to enhance it, and allow better speech understanding in those challenging noisy situations.

Brain Structure

Hearing loss may affect the structure of your brain, as specific brain cells structures can shrink when they don’t get enough stimulation. Hearing aids are designed to provide the wearer with a full sound image to compensate for this lack of stimulation. Some hearing aids can capture a larger sound window, from the softest to loud sounds, without distortion and maintain their intensity to reproduce normal hearing performance.

An assessment by an audioprosthetist is required to determine which hearing aid suits the patient’s needs.

Social Isolation

When you constantly struggle to hear what people are saying and follow conversations, you might prefer to stay home instead of going out and socializing. Wearing hearing aids bilaterally offers many benefits, that can inspire you to get back into your favorite activities:

ª Improved binaural summation of sound intensity, which allows better accuracy in determining the intensity of a sound ª Improved localization capabilities to better identify where sounds are coming from

ª Improved ability to detect speech in a noisy environment

So How Can You Maintain your Hearing Health?

Because it is crucial to keep your brain healthy, it is also essential to maintain your hearing health. Do not let your hearing loss increase over time. Hearing aids are an excellent way to treat your hearing loss, prevent it from worsening and thus keep your brain cells intact by reducing the cognitive load. According to audiologist Majken Roikjer, hearing aids can positively affect an individual mentally and socially. She states that “improving hearing ability by using hearing aids can reduce the isolating effects of a hearing loss and increase the ability to participate in cognitively stimulating activities such as social activities1.”

For more information, don’t hesitate to contact your hearing health professional.

Janic Lauriault

Audiologist

References: - AARP® official site - join & ; explore the benefits. (s. d.). AARP. http://www.aarp.com - WebMD - better information. better health. (s. d.). WebMD. http://www.webmd.com - Access anytime anywhere | cleveland clinic. (s. d.). Cleveland Clinic. http://www.clevelandclinic.org 1. Listen #10