There are more reasons than ever to get your hearing checked regularly and to avoid very loud noises. It turns out that people with hearing loss are far more likely to suffer from depression. This news comes from the Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders. Here we will take a look at this recent study, what people can do to treat this form of hearing loss and depression, and finally how hearing loss can cause depression in a human being.
The Research Project
The research project was very large in its scope and utilized 18,000 different people by first asking them to report their hearing to the institute. For people over the age of 70, they had to go to a clinic to have theirs tested for accuracy. Once all of the self-reporting was completed, the participants took a test that was meant to show if they suffered from depression or were on the brink of depression in some cases.
To the surprise of everyone in the study, the people above the age of 70 with hearing loss showed little signs of an increased prevalence of depression. However, the people under this threshold not only experienced incredibly high rates of hearing loss, but they had an 11% incidence rate of depression. This proved that there was a correlation between hearing loss and depression in people.
What Can We Do?
The first thing that many people ask is what can be done to treat such a disorder, since one part of it relies on the other to be enacted. The obvious answer to many was to treat the depression to improve the person’s life while they worked on the hearing loss. Therapy and medication are good options for these individuals. However, many others advocated for improving the hearing to treat the depression through surgery as well as hearing aids. In many people, it has been shown that a gain in hearing reduces their depression, something that is being looked into by doctors right now.
How Does Hearing Affect Depression?
One of the biggest questions that many people have is how does your hearing affect depression? Put simply, when you take someone that is vibrant in discussions or hobbies and watch as they slowly cannot take part in them, the answer becomes obvious. The withdrawal from their friends, family, and old games takes a very high toll, and allows people to slip into depressive moods more often, culminating in a severe depressive attitude.