Role of Hearing‐Health‐Care Professionals in supporting Patients with Dementia Risk.

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundFor those aged over 65, hearing loss is another major chronic illness. Our findings have revealed that untreated hearing loss is associated with an increased risk of frailty (Tian et al 2021), emotional loneliness (Jayakody et al 2022), and depression (Jayakody et al., 2018). Further, we found an association between hearing loss and cognitive impairment and dementia in non‐tonal language, (Jayakody et al 2018; Ford et al 2018) and tonal language speakers (Fu et al; 2021, 2022, Nicholas et al., 2021).MethodIn this presentation we will discuss the following: knowledge, attitudes and current practices of hearing health care professionals in treating older adults with comorbid hearing loss and cognitive impairment, hearing biomarkers to identify those at risk of dementia and hearing rehabilitation of older adults at risk of cognitive impairment.ResultsThe outcomes of Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice surveys conducted in Australia, China, India, Sri Lanka, Turkey and USA identified gaps in the knowledge and practices of hearing healthcare professionals in cognitive impairment and hearing loss.Our findings also suggest that those with subjective memory complaints, mild cognitive impairment and dementia perform significantly worse than healthy controls in both subjective central auditory processing tasks and objective electrophysiological assessments (Jayakody et al., 2020, Tarawneh et al., 2022).Finally, our results revealed rehabilitation using cochlear implants and hearing aids reduce the rate of cognitive decline in older adults (Jayakody et al., 2017, 2020)ConclusionsHearing healthcare professionals play an essential role in supporting older adults at risk of Dementia. A better understanding of the consequences of untreated hearing loss, providing training to reduce the gaps in their knowledge and practices in treating older adults at risk of comorbid hearing loss and dementia and providing training to use suitable assessment tools to identify cognitive impairment in clinical settings early would be helpful.