Cognitive Screening Can Help You Strengthen Your Memory and Mind

Hearing loss can be scary – cognitive decline and dementia can be scarier as some of the most devastating consequences of untreated hearing loss.

Studies have shown that even individuals with a mild hearing loss are over doubly at risk for dementia later in life. Your hearing is a vital part of keeping your entire body healthy; when your hearing is struggling, your entire body struggles, too.

Hearing loss leads to a disconnect between our ears and our brain, and with that disconnect comes extra strain on our brains to fill in the gaps. Ever feel like you heard someone tell you something important, but you forgot what it was? Straining to listen in conversations that you ultimately give up on because you can’t hear anything?

Cognitive decline can happen to any of us at any time. That’s why we include cognitive screenings during our hearing assessments to make sure that your memory stays sharp as you treat your hearing loss challenges.

How Is Hearing Loss Linked to Cognitive Decline and Dementia?

With untreated hearing loss, you may find yourself concentrating harder: reading lips, understanding body language, and using the contextual information you do hear to fill in the gaps – leading to mental and emotional fatigue.

Hearing loss affects your ability to hear high-frequency sounds and pitches first, which is the most crucial range for speech understanding. When speech is unintelligible, background noise becomes overwhelming, and busy social events with lots of noise become places to avoid for those who can’t hear the people in front of them. Social isolation from hearing loss is more common than you’d think; it also links to elevated stress hormones and a heightened risk of dementia.

To detect early cognitive decline before it starts to affect your day-to-day life, audiology and hearing healthcare play crucial roles. The use of hearing aids has been proven to reduce your risk of dementia, improve your cognitive abilities, and even help you live longer.

A Cognitive Screening Device at Berkeley Hearing Center

Four Commonalities Between Hearing Loss and Cognitive Decline

Common Risk Factors

Some risks that hearing loss and cognitive decline have in common include blood vessel narrowing, social isolation, anxiety, depression, and for some, a struggle to stay balanced, according to some studies.

Structural Changes to the Brain

Areas of the brain that we use for sound processing receive reduced auditory signals with hearing loss challenges, so they begin to shrink or atrophy with limited activity.

Mental Overload

Untreated hearing loss means that other areas of your brain pitch in to compensate for the lack of auditory output. The brain redirects resources to help with speech understanding instead of focusing those resources on what you need to think clearly and remember information.

Social Isolation

Skipping social events or family gatherings is increasingly common for those with an untreated hearing loss. The stress of not hearing your loved ones and struggling to keep up with busy conversations is exhausting, making many individuals avoid going out to their regular spaces altogether.

Avoid Cognitive Decline and Hearing Loss with Our Hearing Assessments

A Patient Being Tested for Cognitive Decline at Berkeley Hearing Center

Hearing loss happens slowly, over time passing; quite often, we don’t realize its impact on our health until someone else points it out to us.

If you feel that you’re struggling to remember information spoken to you, avoiding large events or social gatherings, or that your hearing isn’t where it used to be, our cognitive assessments included in our hearing tests provide you with the opportunity to better understand what your ears and body need to succeed.

Personalized hearing healthcare can help you live a richer, more independent lifestyle with strong, clear hearing and cognitive functions.

Cognivue, an FDA-approved computerized testing technology, is the latest and greatest in cognitive screening that we use in-house to assess your brain health and hearing health. After all, we don’t hear with our ears – we hear with our brains.

What Is Cognivue Screening?

While hearing aids alone cannot reduce the risks of dementia—despite how research cites hearing aids as being a crucial factor to helping your hearing loss and cognitive decline—the best way to help safeguard your brain and hearing is through professional hearing care that includes cognitive screening as part of treatment planning.

Cognivue screening provides a personalized, consistent, and reliable assessment of your overall brain health, allowing you to monitor and address changes to your brain chemistry as they develop.

Features of Cognivue screening include:

  • 10-Minute-long assessments
  • Non-invasive
  • Interactive and intuitive
  • Self-administered
  • Immediate results that are easy to understand
  • Secure and confidential data

Unique software algorithms designed to use patient responses in order to adapt the test according to the patient’s performance help to improve testing accuracy by eliminating testing variability.

What Do Cognitive Screening Results Mean?

#1
#1

Memory Score

Your memory score reflects your ability to retain information while processing new information simultaneously, which plays a crucial role in understanding complex sentences, following abstract thoughts, and comprehending speech within noise.

#2
#2

Visuospatial Score

This indicates how well you use visual cues to process and interpret visual information and also helps you distinguish between speakers in a busy space by being able to identify where a voice or sound is coming from.

#3
#3

Executive Function Score

Your executive function score measures how you fare with staying on task, planning, problem solving, and more. These are skills that help you focus on a single speaker in a noisy environment or distinguish between multiple speakers talking at the same time and the ability to focus on speech while ignoring irrelevant distractions during a conversation.

#4
#4

Reaction Time

A timed response to a stimulus will demonstrate how quickly your brain coordinates between seeing the stimulus and responding to it. Responding in an appropriate time limit when sound or speech signals dictate a quick reaction is a critical measurement of your cognitive function.

#5
#5

Processing Speed

Another timed measurement, your processing speed is how long it takes for you to recognize and process a task. It also relates to your ability to follow rapid and/or complex conversations, especially those taking place in an environment with a significant amount of background noise.

Schedule Your Cognitive Screening Today!

Many individuals avoid hearing care due to negative stigmas surrounding hearing aids, but what they don’t realize is that they’re not just putting their hearing at stake but the health of their brain’s vital functions, too.

Our team of audiologists utilizes Cognivue screening to ensure that you fully understand how integral your hearing is to your holistic health.

If decision-making, remembering information, or other cognitive related issues are becoming a challenge for you or a loved one, then please use this form to contact our hearing care professionals to schedule a diagnostic hearing evaluation with Cognivue cognitive screening.

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