Turn On, Tune In

The No 1 modifiable factor in staving off dementia is, surprisingly, hearing.

- Ruth Nichol

Could tuning ordinary hearing aids in a slightly different way help prevent cognitive decline and dementia in older people with hearing loss?

That’s the question Grant Searchfield, director of the University of Auckland’s hearing and tinnitus clinic, and Megan McAuliffe, from the University of Canterbury’s department of communication disorders, hope to answer in a $1.15 million study involving 200 people aged 65-plus.

All 200 will be first-time hearing-aid users who have been tested and found to have minor difficulties with memory and understanding, which can be an early sign of dementia. Half will be fitted with hearing aids tuned in the normal way; the others will get “cogniaids” – normal hearing aids that have been tuned to take into account the user’s processing difficulties.

“Many of the features in modern hearing aids are designed to work for people who are able to use quickly changing information,” says Searchfield. “A hearing aid tuned this way can create distortion that is not helpful to a person with slower processing – the information essentially becomes jumbled and unclear.”

He says cogniaids will be tuned to make sure the user hears only the most important sounds.