Powerful Conversations Can Lead to Cognitive Well-Being

It can be difficult to stick to activities that are good for your well-being. From waking up early to eating enough vegetables, things that are good for your brain and body can often be a challenge to stick to. Despite the challenges associated with implementing healthier habits, one research-backed tool for a better well-being is something most people already do on a regular basis – regularly participating in conversations with loved ones and friends.

In math class, we learned about the transitive property: If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. In audiology, as researchers continue to uncover new information about the relationship between hearing loss (A) and cognitive decline (C), I’m often interested, along with many patients, to issues of (B) –  social isolation and the ways that better hearing can help them re-engage with friends, family, and the world around them.

As we know, for decades, studies have suggested that there is a connection between hearing loss and cognitive decline. But they’ve also successfully traced the relationships between hearing loss and social isolation, and between social isolation and cognitive decline. In a nutshell, hearing loss can cause people to withdraw from social situations, and a lack of socialization — even loneliness — can lead to cognitive decline and other health issues.

So it stands to reason, if hearing loss can lead to social isolation and social isolation can lead to cognitive decline, then hearing loss can impact cognitive decline.

And this is important to understand because it can be a stretch to draw a line directly from hearing loss to cognitive decline. There’s much we’re still learning about the causational relationship between the two. But we can begin to explain the factors of hearing loss that may impact (not necessarily cause) cognitive decline, like social isolation, which leads to reduced brain stimulation and less cognitive reserve for fending off the effects of decline. 

For those with untreated hearing loss, one of the best ways to fend off social isolation and its associated risks is to enable better communication — to allow them to reconnect with the conversations their hearing loss might otherwise hinder.

Ethical and Responsible Communication is Vital

Because people are living longer, the number of people diagnosed with dementia, a devastating, incurable disease, has markedly increased. This has fueled an abundance of research on preventing dementia. One large area of research has examined modifiable risk factors associated with dementia, including age-related hearing loss. Given the complexities associated with dementia and society’s outcry to prevent it, many of the key research findings are prone to misinterpretation. 

To address these misinterpretations of dementia/hearing loss research, Signia recently sponsored at 90-minute course at the annual meeting of the Academy of Doctors of Audiology. Lead by NYU Medical School professor, Jan Blustein, MD, PhD, the course teaches hearing care professionals how to ethically and responsibly discuss how hearing loss might affect dementia, and the possible role hearing aids play in slowing it down. The course can be viewed here.

Hearing Aids Foster Social Connections

Among the studies exploring the connection between hearing health and cognitive health are those that specifically suggest hearing aids can slow cognitive decline, including related conditions such as dementia. These studies are encouraging, but as many have pointed out, there’s still much to discern about the difference between correlation and causation.

But we know pretty well that hearing aids can help with socialization, emotional health, and wellbeing. Indeed, hearing aids can amplify what the wearer has been missing, making them feel more part of their surroundings. But the key to improving socialization is to help them, well, socialize. And that’s where advances in hearing aid technology come into play.

To keep those with hearing loss from withdrawing, risking isolation, and thereby putting their cognitive health in jeopardy, hearing aids had to evolve to support the most basic yet challenging social situation: group conversation. Because it’s one thing to improve someone’s ability to have a one-directional dialogue in a noisy restaurant, for example. It’s another to account for multiple speakers changing positions and entering the conversation at different times and volumes — especially in noisy environments.

Yet that’s what group conversation is. It’s naturally dynamic. After years developing hearing aids that reduce background noise and better preserve speech, a new class now fully accounts for the dynamism of conversation, allowing wearers to reconnect, contribute, engage and avoid the social isolation that could threaten their cognitive health.

Rejoining the Conversation

At Signia, this new class of hearing aid is designed around its Integrated Xperience (IX) platform, the first platform of its kind specifically engineered to optimize performance in group conversations and social situations. It builds on Signia’s 20-year legacy of wireless communication between the wearer’s left and right hearing aids and enables Integrated Xperience devices to detect and boost conversations from three acoustic snapshots in front of the wearer and one behind. Other hearing aids offer some tools to help improve the wearer’s conversational ability and engagement, but in fast-changing, dynamic social situations, they can struggle to keep up with the pace of conversation.

Signia Integrated Xperience is unique in its multi-stream architecture, which can pinpoint multiple moving conversation partners in real-time. Signia’s RealTime Conversation Enhancement solution analyzes, augments, and adapts to the dynamic flow of multi-party conversation environments.

What’s more, hearing aids developed with the Integrated Xperience platform, such as the Signia Styletto IX, Silk Pure Charge&Go IX and Insio IX have been engineered to be both discrete and stylish. This helps normalize and even conceal the hearing aids themselves, so the user feels more confident using them and thereby engaging in group conversation.

This confidence for those with hearing loss to prioritize their hearing health and reconnect with conversation is really the goal – conversations and social engagement are crucial aspects of our cognitive health, and should be treated as such.

As hearing technology makes great strides, it’s critical that we take advantage to address what we can with today’s advancements. Conversation isn’t just one of the most natural aspects of human connection, it’s a tool for mitigating social isolation and prioritizing cognitive health and overall well-being, and it’s something that, with new hearing aid technology, we can and should treat with the respect it deserves. 

Brian Taylor, AuD, is Senior Director of Audiology at Signia, a division of WS Audiology.

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