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The Better Hearing Institute, a not-for-profit organization, recommends getting a hearing test once a decade until age 50, and once every three years after that. For those with hearing issues or high-risk professions, it is recommended to get a hearing test once a year.
These recommendations aren’t just so you can find out you have hearing loss and be done with it. There are treatments available, like hearing aids, that can not only improve your sense of well-being but also prevent unfortunate outcomes. While once upon a time we may have thought that hearing loss was a usually inevitable, perhaps annoying, and generally benign part of getting older, we now know that hearing loss can lead to a variety of problems we don’t want to have.
Hearing Tests and Good Health
Hearing tests might not be part of regular medical checkups, but they’re an important part of maintaining our overall good health. Especially for those who are starting to notice problems with their hearing, whether it’s a suspicion of hearing loss or annoying tinnitus, getting a hearing test sooner than later is crucial to discovering the depth of the issue, preventing further hearing loss, and avoiding the cascade of negative health outcomes that untreated hearing loss can engender.
Fatigue… and More
Anyone who suffers hearing loss will tell you just how exhausting it is to try to participate in conversations when you can’t hear what other people are saying. Well, as time goes on, the problem becomes a little more serious than just getting tired sooner than you used to.
The Auditory Cortex
When we can’t hear properly, we’re underutilizing our auditory cortex. This part of the brain, located behind our ears, is developed to take the big mass of sound that our ears pick up and sort through it. Though this process gets specific in many ways, perhaps the most important specific thing it does is decipher speech and commit it to short term memory. As our ears send it less and less sound, it can’t perform this task any longer.
We may still be able to make out what other people are saying, by reading lips and using context clues, but now we are “hearing” more with our frontal cortex than our auditory cortex. A process that our brain has grown into and adjusted to doing automatically is now performed with great extra effort by a different part of the brain.
The Frontal Cortex
Our frontal cortex is responsible for all of our higher-order thinking. When we talk about the special potential of the human being versus other members of the animal kingdom, it’s the frontal cortex we’re talking about. We use this part of our brains to be creative. We use it to analyze the things that others have said to us and formulate responses. When we’re using it just to find out what is being said, we can’t focus as easily on actually participating in the conversation. The harmony of our brain has been disrupted.
Brain Atrophy
If this situation is allowed to continue, we see that the auditory cortex actually shrinks. The brain cells don’t die, but the network that supports them “collapses” in a way, getting smaller. The frontal cortex expands to try to pick up the slack, but it’s not as good at doing the job as the auditory cortex was, and it isn’t as directly connected to short term memory. Indeed, people who have suffered from untreated hearing loss for a long time tend to report difficulties with memory and less confidence in their thinking.
Furthermore, even once hearing ability is restored to near-normal, using hearing aids, these people will continue to have difficulty understanding speech. As the auditory cortex has atrophied, they’ve lost the ability to automatically decipher speech. It can take some time and effort to relearn, which is why many audiologists will offer training courses to new hearing aid users, which can be taken mostly online and in a few group meetings.
Hearing Aids
If you or someone you love is having new hearing issues, the best thing to do is get a hearing test and find out what can be done to improve hearing ability going forward. In most cases, hearing aids can do all that is needed to prevent negative health outcomes due to hearing loss, so don’t delay! Contact us today for comprehensive hearing health services.