New Year’s Resolution: Get Your Hearing Tested

The New Year is here and with it comes all the big dreams for a fresh start and focus into a new year and a new decade.  We make all sorts of promises to ourselves. For instance we may promise our selves we will eat healthier or keep a cleaner house but often these resolutions slip away as the year progresses.  If you want to make a big difference in your life that will affect your overall health scheduling a hearing test is an excellent place to start. The benefits of knowing your hearing health and taking action will improve every aspect of your life and may even make it more possible to keep your other new years resolutions.

The benefits of addressing hearing loss sooner than later

Delaying getting a hearing evaluation or putting off treatment of an already diagnosed hearing loss is more dangerous to your well being than you may realize. There are a multitude of reasons why detecting hearing loss and treating it sooner than later is beneficial to you. It can help improve your quality of life, lead to the detection of unknown illnesses elsewhere in the body & the most important is what it does for your brain. Various surveys show people often wait years before they purchase their first hearing aids, some as long as 15 years. Of the 28.8 million Americans (age 20-69) who could benefit from wearing hearing aids, fewer than 16 percent have ever used them.

Hearing with more than our ears

It is a common misconception that we hear with our ears.  Our ears are only a pathway to hearing. We actually process sound through our brain. When there is a hearing loss present, the way the sound is processed by the brain becomes unorganized. The use of hearing aids can help re-organize the signal and send it along the correct pathway, resulting in better sound processing by the brain. The most common treatment for hearing loss is the use of hearing aids and recent advancements in technology have allowed the devices to become more effective, user friendly and more comfortable.

The dangers of untreated hearing loss

Hearing loss isn’t just an ear issue; but affects every aspect of your life from physical to mental health. Untreated hearing loss has been associated with decreased cognitive function, compromised mental health, and social withdrawal and isolation. Similar to how you need exercise to keep your body healthy, your ears need to hear sounds and recognize them to function at their best. When your hearing loss goes untreated your brain has to work overtime to recognize sounds. The longer you wait to use hearing aids, the worse you become at recognizing and translating speech. Not wearing your hearing aids can affect many aspects of your health. Some of the unexpected health risks of untreated hearing loss include:

Cognition: The inability of the brain to process certain sounds because they cannot be “heard” effects higher level cognitive functioning. The brain must work harder to understand what it hears.

Dementia: Older adults and seniors with hearing loss are significantly more likely to develop problems with thinking and memory, and diagnosed with dementia.

Brain Shrinkage: The brain naturally becomes smaller with age, however older adults with untreated hearing loss have shown to have an increased rate of brain shrinkage.

Risk of Falling: Middle aged individuals diagnosed with even a mild hearing loss are three-times more likely to have a history of falling. Because the brain is working harder to hear and understand, the extra effort is taken away from other areas of the brain that help maintain gait and balance.

Depression: There is an increasing amount of studies and support to show that undiagnosed and untreated hearing loss has a high correlation with depression. Individuals with hearing loss are 57 percent more likely to suffer from deep episodes of stress, bad moods and depression as compared to their counterparts with normal hearing.

FitHearing Audiology Network

Don’t put off a hearing test another year.  Now is the time to schedule an appointment for a hearing test with us at FitHearing Audiology Network.  We can diagnose your hearing and help you find the best plan of treatment to make your life and your health the best it can be in 2020.