Dementia: Doctor outlines changes to help prevent disease
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People who struggle to hear conservations in noisy rooms are twice more likely to develop dementia, a study has found. A study, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, showed that difficulty hearing spoken conversations, particularly in noisy environments, is associated with a 91 percent increased risk of dementia. The study authors analysed data from more than 82,000 participants over the age of 60 to identify new dementia risk factors.
Lead author on the study, Jonathan Stevenson, said: “Difficulty hearing speech in background noise is one of the most common problems for people with age related hearing impairment.
“This is the first study to investigate its association with dementia in a large population.”
The researchers found that struggling to follow a conversation in a noisy environment was a risk factor of dementia that ‘could be treated’ and potentially hold off the condition.
At the beginning of the study, participants were asked to identify spoken numbers against a backdrop of white noise.
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Participants were then placed into normal, insufficiency and poor-speech-noise hearing groups, based on the results of the test.
Over the next 11 years, hospital inpatient and death register records showed that 1,285 of participants were identified as developing dementia.
Insufficient and poor speech-in-noise hearing were associated with a 61 percent and 91 percent increased risk of developing dementia.
According to the World Health Organisation, hearing impairment affect around 1.5 billion people worldwide.
Dr Stevenson said difficulty hearing speech in background noise is one of the most common problems for people with age-related hearing impairment.
Difficulty hearing can have an impact on elderly people’s day-to-day functioning, and can cause them to become socially isolated.
The study authors will next set out to investigate how treating mid-life hearing impairments can reduce the risk of dementia developing in a person’s senior years.
Dr Thomas Littlejohns, senior author, said: “Dementia affects millions of individuals worldwide, with the number of cases projected to triple in the next few decades.
“However, there is growing evidence that developing dementia is not inevitable and that the risk could be reduced by treating pre-existing conditions.
“Whilst preliminary, these results suggest speech-in-noise hearing impairment could represent a promising target for dementia prevention.”
Dementia is a syndrome associated with an ongoing decline of brain functioning, which affects roughly one in 14 people over the age of 65, and one in six people over 80.
It is caused by damage to brain cells, which interferes with the ability of brain cells to communicate with each other and affects the brain’s ability to think, feel or behave normally.
There are currently 850,000 people estimated to be living with dementia in the UK.
While the illness mostly affects elderly people, there are more than 40,000 younger people in the UK with dementia.
There is no treatment currently available to cure dementia or to alter its progressive course. However, numerous treatments are being investigated.
Studies show that people can reduce their risk of dementia by getting regular exercise, not smoking, eating a healthy diets and avoiding harmful use of alcohol.
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