Hope Lanter explains why hearing loss might lead to dementia. When you can't hear well, your brain works harder to process sound, like a program hogging your computer's memory. Over time, that extra strain may damage your overall cognitive function.
Let's talk about a little bit of a controversial topic: the connection between hearing loss and dementia. There have been so many studies in the last few years highlighting the connection between the two. However, some people say, "No, that's not true." Some people say it's highly, highly proven. So what we want to talk about is the how does it really work. The way I like to think about this is if you had your computer and you had so many programs running at once, Does it slow it down? Obviously, yes. We only have so much working memory there, and so that means that everything is basically impacted by how many things are happening at once. Hearing loss is like taking one of those programs and making it take up so much more space. This is bogging down the whole computer. If we run that way for a very long time, we see the whole system start to break down. It creates problems. It creates a lot of issues for us in being able to say, you know, is everything working as efficiently as it can?
