While participants with chronic tinnitus reported more difficulties hearing in noisy environments than controls in some studies, participants with chronic tinnitus also more frequently reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. It is interesting to note that participants in one study with chronic tinnitus did not report more noise exposure than controls, despite this finding in other studies. This latter finding is not surprising given that participant recall limits the accuracy of self-reports of noise exposure and that exposure episodes’ frequency and repetition affect the participant’s recall.

Due to its potential connection to aging, many people believe that tinnitus is only a problem for adults. However, research in publications has indicated otherwise. Tinnitus affects between 4.7% and 46% of children in the general pediatric population and among children whose hearing is good. It also affects between 23.5% and 62.2% of children who have hearing loss. However, these estimates may not relate to real-world situations.

Some experts say that the numbers for children’s tinnitus prevalence are too low because of problems with communication. On the other hand, it could be said that kids lie about having tinnitus when they are asked to please the person asking. A subjective experience, tinnitus in children may be very difficult to know its extent in the population. In adults, its assessment may be quite different.

Often, chronic tinnitus-related distress (TRD) happens along with or instead of psychological or psychosomatic symptoms like depression, anxiety, or other somatization symptoms that may or may not happen in the context of clear medical factors like vertigo, sweating, blurred vision, headaches, periods of weakness, pain, nausea, or shortness of breath.

People who said they had chronic tinnitus were more likely to have weaker middle-ear muscle reactions, fewer cochlear nerve responses, and more activity in the central auditory pathways.

Reports indicate hearing loss linked to getting older before age 65 is more common in men, especially in people who have been around noise a lot. Also, in line with what has been written, people with chronic tinnitus were more likely to have had a concussion and show signs of anxiety and/or depression.

People who say they have tinnitus are often given the wrong diagnosis and think that their doctors do not understand or appreciate their condition. This feeling that their doctors do not understand can make their condition worse by making them depressed, stressed, tired, unable to cope, losing the ability to do daily tasks, having poor cognitive functioning, or even committing suicide. It is a very serious condition when we consider its far-reaching effects on someone’s life and their psychological difficulties.

There is a lot of agreement around the world that specialized cognitive-behavioral therapy should be used to help people with tinnitus. This is because there is more evidence that this type of therapy works to reduce patients’ distress and impairment. However, it has been suggested that CBT could also change how people experience tinnitus, but this has not yet been tested across studies.

Numerous options are available in addition to those that doctors provide, both online and elsewhere. When searching online, it is important to be wary of any claims that they can “cure,” “reduce,” or “eliminate” tinnitus. You can download many sound-therapy apps for free or very little money and use them on your phone.

One new app is receiving favorable attention. The MindEar app uses chatbots to help people with tinnitus use a virtual cognitive-behavioral therapist. The app also uses sound therapy, mindfulness, and meditation techniques to help people tune out the effects of their tinnitus in their minds.

For anyone with tinnitus, the thing to remember is that there are ways to learn to cope with it and to utilize various means at their disposal in a self-help mode. All is not lost, and the future will bring even better resolution to those affected by tinnitus.

The post Do You Hear What I Hear? The Bane of Tinnitus appeared first on Medika Life.

Not a disease, tinnitus is a symptom of age-related hearing loss. The source may be the tiny hairs (cilia) in the ear’s cochlea. These hairs are responsible not only for hearing but for balance. They are not regenerative and are damaged by excessive noise, disease, or toxins. Once gone, there is no remediation.

Tinnitus can be a nuisance and highly distracting, but it is not typically harmful. Treatment can be managed with hearing aids or other sound-masking devices. But there’s more here than meets the eye because research has pointed to several factors, sleep deficiency, anxiety, depression, and stress, as affecting the sound’s intensity and occurrence.

Stress plays an essential role in the loudness or the noise in the ears, and it is here that we can help ourselves. Engaging in stress-reducing techniques would seem worthwhile for tinnitus sufferers.

Patients with tinnitus took part in a study of 180 subjects with chronic tinnitus and were administered a particular scale, the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory. The scale evaluates how tinnitus impacted their quality of life. Sixty-five percent of the subjects had stress symptoms.

The researchers showed a clear progression of increase in stress with the measures noted on the inventory. As stress increases, therefore, the impact of tinnitus has a greater quality of life effect on these individuals.

What effect does a lack of sleep have on tinnitus’ quality of life?

Several measures have been used to assess tinnitus associated with anxiety of a state or trait level. Is the person mostly anxious all of the time, i.e., trait anxiety, or is it the situation in which they find themselves, i.e., state anxiety? Also, levels of sleep quality were assessed related to whether or not the person had a bed partner or they found it difficult to fall asleep, their sleep duration, and sleep medications that they may have been using.

At least one study indicated that quality of life had an overriding effect on tinnitus severity, along with levels of depression. The researchers suggested, Since the category of major depression does not include tinnitus as a characteristic entity, we are forced to conclude that depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders are rather a consequence of the helplessness induced by the uncontrollable phantom sound.

But some research points to something other than sleep or stress; habituation. As data accumulate from cross-sectional behavioral and brain imaging studies, the neural bases of successful habituation are becoming more apparent, pointing to interconnected neural networks mediating cognition and emotion and, only secondarily, audition. What remains unclear are the longitudinal changes in these networks culminating in successful habituation, with or without an intervention. Anyone who uses a hearing aid will experience a period of adjustment (habituation) to their new level of hearing and the device. Tinnitus may require the same adjustment.

Here, thanks to neuroimaging, we see how the brain and our efforts can have a neural impact on the brain. By exercising this personal power, we may overcome the effects of tinnitus on our lives.

Research at the University of Michigan Engineering is already showing progress on a device that might utilize adjacent neural connections to the auditory system and could help anyone with tinnitus. Not a new finding; they’ve completed 15 years of work on tinnitus, how it is created, and where remediation may lie.

The post Sleep Loss and Stress Are Stealthy Culprits in Tinnitus Increase or Are They? appeared first on Medika Life.

Worldwide up to 1.5 billion people have hearing loss which may reach 2.5 billion by 2030. Fifty-five million people have dementia, and we are now learning that hearing loss, a factor not considered previously, may play a role in its development.

Research studies have now identified midlife hearing loss as an independent risk factor for dementia, which is involved in 9% of cases of dementia. The question which begs an answer is how could hearing loss be related to dementia, and this is the area where hearing pathology and the amelioration of hearing loss may play significant roles.

Healthcare professionals already saw the effect hearing loss had on the emotional state of their patients. Patients with mild to moderate hearing loss were often depressed and began to seclude themselves, avoiding conversations in groups or settings where music was playing. It decreased their interest in social activities, and, therefore, hearing loss began to affect their physical stability as well. Less interaction often leads to fewer physical activities, which plays a role in physical and emotional health as it also affects the immune system.

Researchers now know that the brain’s memory center, the hippocampus, is also affected by hearing loss. Studies have shown a direct relationship between manipulating auditory information, whether speech, music, environmental, emotional or other sounds, with this prime memory area of the brain.

Hearing involvement in cognitive processing and dementia may be worse than patients realize. In a study that tracked 639 adults for nearly 12 years, Johns Hopkins expert Frank Lin, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues found that mild hearing loss doubled dementia risk. Moderate loss tripled risk, and people with a severe hearing impairment were five times more likely to develop dementia.

Hearing loss, therefore, is a formidable challenge in terms of dementia and maintaining cognition. Various brain scanning methods have verified the physical extent to which brain atrophy is affected by hearing loss.

Although hearing loss may come as a function of aging and changes in the hearing mechanism of the ear, we now know that environmental noise can exacerbate this loss and bring on neuropsychiatric outcomes such as memory impairment, a.k.a. dementia. The sources identified as most concerning for noise exposure include traffic noise and other environmental noise-producing factors. This could be most relevant in job situations where noise is constantly present.

Not only does noise affect hearing, but it also affects the central nervous system and the brain, which may increase the risk of stroke, dementia, cognitive decline, neurodevelopmental disorders, depression, and anxiety disorder.

The Role of Hearing Aids

The question of hearing loss and its relationship to dementia also brings into consideration another question; would treatment with hearing aids be helpful in either delaying dementia or in reversing some forms of it? Previously, studies that attempted to measure cognitive outcomes when hearing interventions were provided have been short-lived because of the general population’s lack of hearing aid use or compliance.

Hearing aids have been out of the financial reach of many (costing between $4-$6K) or have been unsuitable because of their design or effects on environmental sounds; we have little evidence to go on. Now, however, that the FDA has agreed to the provision of selling over-the-counter hearing aids and negating the need for a medical exam or an audiology exam, there may be noticeable changes in the hearing-loss population.

The difficulties, however, still exist because many will find the units out of reach for them because of pricing. Still, we hope that competition and technological developments and innovations will make them available to the larger population.

Could hearing aids be remediation in some manner and tap into the brain’s ability to change the hippocampal structures destroyed through hearing loss? Biologists know that the brain contains stem cells that might be brought into use through innovative techniques not yet envisioned by researchers but potentially viable in abstraction.

Could these hippocampal cells be prompted to replace sections devoted to cognition that are atrophied by hearing loss? The question is intensely exciting and necessitates research toward that end.

The post Hearing Loss Contributes to Mental Suffering and Dementia Despair appeared first on Medika Life.

“By 2050, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia prevalence will rise to nearly 13 million. To bring this back to a more understandable level, The Alzheimer’s Association offers this sobering statistic:

One in 3 seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another dementia (such as dementia with Lewy bodies).

Let’s be clear: There is no proven cure or highly effective treatment for Alzheimer’s. Nevertheless, a growing body of research strongly suggests that combining healthy lifestyle habits can reduce your risk of cognitive decline.”

Dementia — risk factors

An update to the 2017 Lancet Commission report is our focus. Initially, the group reported nine potentially modifiable risk factors for dementia:

• less education
• high blood pressure (hypertension)
• hearing impairment
• smoking
• obesity
• depression
• physical inactivity
• diabetes
• low social contact

We can now add three more: Excessive alcohol consumption, traumatic brain injury, and air pollution.

Dementia — What can we do to reduce risk?

There is some good news: Given the 12 modifiable risk factors are responsible for approximately two in five cases of dementia worldwide, we have the opportunity to change the natural history of the disease for 40 percent of us.

The Lancet Commission report authors categorize risk reduction strategies as 1) reducing pathologic damage (inflammatory, blood vessel, or amyloid/tau plaque-related); and 2) maintaining or improving cognitive reserve.

I plan to stay active cognitively, socially, and physically. We have little evidence for any single activity protecting against Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Still, sustained physical activity in midlife (and perhaps in later life, too) drops dementia risk. This improvement in odds may be secondary to the associated decreases in obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular risk factors.

If my hearing diminishes, I will not be too proud to decline hearing aids. And you? How are you reducing your risk of suffering from memory loss? Oh, one more thing — Watch the sugary beverages:Drinking This Twice Daily May Increase Your Dementia RiskWHAT TYPES OF BEVERAGES do you enjoy? I enjoy a single cup of espresso each morning, a mid-morning cup of tea, and…medium.com.

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