Our five predominant senses (hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch) take information from our environment and send it to our brain. It is a known fact that as we age, the way our senses give us this info changes. MedlinePlus informs us that our senses become less sharp, and “…this can make it harder for us to notice details.” In other words, aging raises the threshold at which we catch the “stimulation cue. Aging especially affects our hearing and vision thresholds.”
Your ears have two main jobs: 1. Hearing where vibrations are changed into nerve signals in the inner ear and travel via the auditory nerve to the brain. 2. Maintaining balance or equilibrium controlled in the inner ear. There, fluid and small hairs stimulate the auditory nerve to help the brain maintain balance.
Costco Connection’s November 2015 publication explains that 76.4 million baby boomers and other older adults find themselves in social situations involving the below questions.
If you answer “Yes” to three or more of the following questions, you should probably be checked by a health care provider for possible hearing loss.
1. Do I have trouble understanding a conversation?
2. Do I have a problem hearing on my phone or cell phone?
3. If there is noise in the background, do I have difficulty hearing the foreground sounds?
4. Do I find that many people I talk to seem to be inaudible?
5. Do I ask people to repeat what they have said often?
6. Is it hard for me to understand two or more people talking in the same conversation?
Hearing loss, a true public health inconvenience, has been connected with other long-reaching situations such as medical, social, and reasoning problems, including falls and dementia.
Recently, Dr. Frank Lin of John Hopkins and Dr. Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging, after analyzing data from more than 2000 participants exploring the effects of inadequate hearing, deduced one gigantic problem: falling. People with just a mild loss of hearing (25 decibels loss) were found to have nearly three times greater a history of falling than normal hearing individuals. John Hopkins released a statement that “… every additional 10 decibels of hearing loss increased the chances of falling by 1.4 fold.” Excluding participants with moderate to severe loss still showed the same results. Other factors such as age, sex, race, and cardiovascular disease showed no change in the falling results either.
Another strong association based on recent research is that of dementia and hearing loss. With diminished hearing, your brain is working “overtime” to try to make sense of what it hears. This can include taking in muffled sounds around you, as well as noises needed for safety as you walk or drive. As we age, it becomes a monumental problem to do all of these processes at one time. For those who suffer with tinnitus (abnormal ear noise) or Meniere’s Disease (a severe balance problem), even more energy is used by the brain to process sounds and balance at one time. The Meniere’s Australia Support Group states, “Hearing loss can use up to 50 percent of (someone’s) energy on communication (alone).” Those with normal hearing might use only 5%. The “cognitive burden” involving tenuous listening and lip reading can be exhausting tasks according to the experts. Lin tells us that researchers are beginning to understand “that there are likely mechanistic pathways through which hearing loss contributes to an accelerated decline in the cognitive and physical functioning of older adults.”
If you are challenged by hearing loss, have a hearing test performed by a medical professional ASAP. You might simply need to have an abundance of wax removed from your ears. But if you are recommended to wear a hearing aid, do not hesitate to purchase the new technically advanced devices available in today’s market to meet your needs and budget. The aids are not a cure, but they will provide you with a great improvement in communication (your hearing and listening abilities) and, therefore, your quality of life. Sadly, 80% of people who could be benefitting from using hearing aids choose not to wear them.
In addition, Dr. Timothy Hullar, now a Professor of Otolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat) at Oregon’s Health & Science University provides this startling result of one small study performed December 2014 at St. Louis’ Washington University.
“The participants appeared to be using the sound information coming through their hearing aids as auditory reference points or landmarks to help maintain balance.”
