Hearing aids could help approximately 28 million people. What this means is that 28 million people could here their environment clearer if they wore hearing aids. But your hearing aids will also help you take advantage of some other health advantages.
Your mental and physical health can, as it turns out, be improved by something as straight forward as wearing hearing aids. Everything from a risk of falling to depression can be slowed or even stopped by these gadgets. In more ways than one, your hearing aids can help you stay on your feet.
Hearing Aids And Mental Health Advantages
Modern medical studies have solidly demonstrated a link between hearing loss and cognitive decline. Currently, the thinking is that, for a mixture of mental, social, and physical reasons, hearing loss can trigger an escalated danger of mental illness, including anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, and dementia.
So the mental health benefits of hearing aids shouldn’t be very unexpected.
Dementia Risks Reduced
Your chances of dementia can be lowered, as reported by one study, by nearly 20%. And all you need to do to take advantage of this awesome benefit is remember to wear your hearing every day.
In other research, the onset of dementia was delayed by as much as two years by wearing hearing aids. This is very encouraging and with more research done to duplicate and clarify these figures, we can come a long way in the battle against cognitive decline and illness.
Depression And Anxiety Can be Reduced
Countless individuals suffer from anxiety and depression even if they don’t have hearing loss. But individuals with hearing loss have been shown to be at a higher risk of depression and anxiety over time.
When you use hearing aids, you tend to stay more mentally focused and engaged socially. Hearing aids can be especially helpful if those factors are contributing to depression and anxiety.
You’ll Feel Less Lonely
While it may not sound as dire or important as dementia, for individuals with untreated hearing loss, loneliness can be a serious issue, caused by and exacerbating a sense of social solitude. That social separation can cause substantial changes to your mood. So it can be an enormous benefit if your hearing aids can help you stay socially active.
And this is an excellent reason why, for example, your hearing aid can help counter conditions like depression. All of these health issues, to some extent, are in some way connected.
The Physical Advantages of Hearing Aids
There’s some evidence which suggests that as hearing loss symptoms become more noticeable, your danger of stroke escalates. But this research is in preliminary stages. It’s a little simpler to recognize the more pronounced physical benefit of hearing aids: you won’t fall as much.
This happens for two reasons:
- Situational awareness: Hearing aids can increase your situational awareness.
- Fall detection: Many times, it’s getting back up after a fall that is the significant hazard, not the fall itself. Many new models of hearing aids have fall detection built in. You can program emergency phone numbers into your phone which will automatically be called if you take a tumble.
Falling can have fairly significant health effects, particularly as you get older. So avoiding falls (or minimizing the damage from falling) can be a significant advantage that ripples throughout your overall health.
Be Certain to Wear Your Hearing Aids
These benefits, it’s worth mentioning, apply to individuals who suffer from hearing impairment. Hearing aids won’t, for instance, help somebody with healthy hearing avoid falling.
But wearing your hearing aids, if you do have hearing loss, is the smartest thing you can do for overall health.