Most replayed moment: The hidden dangers of hearing loss | Prof. Marcelo Rivolta

Jonathan Wolf (0:01)

Hello, and welcome to ZOE Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

The world around us is louder than ever. From booming speakers to roaring traffic, our ears can take quite a beating. But have you ever stopped to consider the long-term impact of all this noise? Because hearing loss isn't just about your ears. Emerging research suggests it could also affect your brain health in surprising ways. I'm joined by Dr. Marcelo Rivolta to explore how noise exposure can cause lasting damage. He shares the early warning signs to look out for. What to do if your hearing begins to decline, and simple steps you can take to protect these vital organs on the side of your head.

What's it like to suffer hearing loss and how does it impact your life?

Marcelo Rivolta (0:52)

It can have a very, very substantial impact. One of the things, and I think probably a lot of people in the audience may relate to this, you start having to put the volume up in certain devices because you cannot get the same kind of information, the same kind of hearing that you had before. But that in a way is more of a symptom. The thing when it starts impacting your life is when it starts affecting your communication with other people.

There is a very telling sentence that Helen Keller, who was a teacher, suffered from blindness and hearing loss in the first part of the 20th century.

Because she was blind and deaf, she was asked which one was impacting her life more, the loss of sight or the loss of hearing. She very pognantly said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it was without a doubt hearing, because blindness sort of cuts you off from things around you, but hearing cuts you from people because affects communication. You go to a pub to have a conversation with some friends, and all of a sudden, you are in that very loud environment, and you cannot understand what they are saying, and you start asking for them to repeat things. And after a while, you just feel embarrassed. You don't want to ask the same thing over and over again. And then you start feeling more withdrawn, more ostracized, and then you stop going to the pub, because I can't hear what they are saying, I can't have a conversation. And that is impacting your ability to communicate, your ability to interact, but force you to kind of almost withdraw from your social life. And that has a huge impact on your daily life and on your future sort of welfare as well, your social interaction.

Jonathan Wolf (2:31)

And how does that then affect your health?

Marcelo Rivolta (2:33)

One of the things that healing loss has been shown in the last few years, and there is an increasing volume of research identifying a link between, for example, healing loss and dementia. Roughly, it is said, for those people that develop severe healing loss in sort of midlife, they have a five-fold enhanced risk of developing dementia, and later on.

Jonathan Wolf (2:57)

They have a five-fold higher risk of getting dementia if you get hearing loss.

Marcelo Rivolta (3:01)

If you get severe hearing loss. If you have a moderate hearing loss, it's about two-fold the risk later in life.

Why is that? It is still not clear. There are different theories trying to explain this. One is cognitive overload. You need to make more effort to listen and to understand, so your brain uses a lot of more brain power to call it in a simple way, and that sort of produces kind of a more intense sort of work there. There are other theories that perhaps the conditions that lead to develop hearing loss are underpinning and underline the condition that will develop dementia as well. Whatever the explanation and the justification of the link is, it's clear that the link seems to be there, and we can minimize that risk by intervening early with your hearing loss, when you start feeling that you are losing your sense of hearing.

Jonathan Wolf (3:54)

I find it rather extraordinary that hearing loss should have such a big impact, because we've done podcasts talking about dementia, and people are often talking about this thing is like a 30 percent increase or a 40 percent increase in risk, so it's like fivefold is enormous.

Marcelo Rivolta (4:08)

It is one of the highest links, but also one of the things that can be modified, because other things like, for example, genetics are more difficult to impact, but hearing loss is one of those that is something can be done in order to prevent the higher risk later in life.