It turns out that people have even more reasons than ever before to watch out for hearing loss. According to a recent study that was done by the Institute for Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders, hearing loss can result in depression. This study was recently compiled and released so that everyone could view it. In this article, we will take a closer look at the study, the way that hearing loss causes depression, as well as how you can prevent hearing loss from occurring.
How To Prevent Hearing Loss
Before we take a look at the study, it is important to realize that there are many ways that people can go about saving their hearing health. The very first thing that you can do is to avoid taking unneeded risks with your hearing health. This means that you should not spend a great deal of time in loud areas without having some form of hearing protection. That is one of the other most important aspects of maintaining hearing health: using hearing protection when you are in excessively loud areas. With both of these tips in mind, you will be much less likely to incur hearing damage throughout your life.
How Hearing Loss Causes Depression
The mechanism behind hearing loss causing depression is rather simple. Rather than having a direct result through brain damage, another route that is being explored, hearing loss affects depression by virtue of depriving people of their most fun and worthwhile tasks. Not being able to take part in familiar hobbies can harm individual’s self esteem as well as their sense of fun. Also, if you cannot hold a conversation with loved ones, it also has a negative impact. Combined, these two factors can cause a person to become more withdrawn than ever before, resulting in depression.
The Study And Results
The study itself was completed by 18,000 volunteers under the guidance of specialists at the Institute for Deafness and other Communication Disorders. They all had their hearing levels tested, self reported under the age of 70 and tested in a lab over 70, and were then given an assessment to determine if they had depression. While this was a rather simple process, the results were absolutely incredible. As it turns out, people under the age of 70 who had hearing loss had an 11% chance of having depression, compared to just 4% of the population at large.
The people over the age of 70 did not have this occurrence, despite having hearing loss at higher levels; a confounding factor. The bottom line is that hearing loss and depression are irrevocably connected. Further research is going to look at this phenomenon for more information.