Hearing loss could affect your brain power, study shows | Science - The New Daily

Losing your hearing is a downer, sure, but there’s something else you should know: you could be losing your mind, too, says Samantha Dick, Reporter at The New Daily.

What can really cause hearing loss?
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US researchers have found a link between hearing loss and poorer cognition in people over 50, even in people who think they have ‘normal’ hearing.

And this connection between hearing and cognition could be present earlier than we think.

Of the 6451 people examined in the study, most were Hispanic women aged over 50. Researchers assessed their hearing and measured how well they performed cognitive tasks, such as memory tests or Spanish-English learning trials...

Dr Justin Golub, the study’s lead author, is an assistant professor at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Centre in New York.

He suggested that “people with worse hearing use so much more brainpower to decode the words that are said, they don’t get to process the meaning of what was said, which is the intellectually stimulating part”.
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Source: The New Daily