Today, we understand that a person’s genetics and health conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes are associated with dementia risk.
But an interesting study in a recent edition of the journal JAMA Network Open reveals a risk factor not previously known.
Yet most of us are at high risk of this cause of dementia.
A team of Taiwanese researchers identified 8,135 people who were newly diagnosed with hearing loss between 2000 and 2011 from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan. They then found the same number of hearing people with whom to compare them.
Almost all of the subjects were between 54 and 76 years old with an average age of 65.
The research question was: “How many people from each group will develop dementia between 2000 and 2013?”
In the hearing loss group, the rate of dementia was 19.38 per 1000 person-years, compared with 13.98 in the hearing group.
When they crunched the numbers further, they discovered that people with hearing loss had a 17% risk of dementia.
This was especially high for people with hearing loss between the ages of 45 to 64, who had more than twice the risk that their peers with good hearing had.
40% of people in this age group with hearing loss suffered some level of dementia during the follow-up period.
The researchers were not sure why they found an association between hearing loss and dementia. But despite this finding, hearing loss is not a leading cause of dementia.
Numerous studies have now shown that to prevent and even reverse dementia, all you have to do is load up on the one free ingredient explained here…
Warm regards,
Christian Goodman
