Hearing is important, not only for convenience, but also for cognitive health—as an inability to participate in what for most people is an important part of social life, has been shown to accelerate cognitive decline:

14 Powerful Strategies To Prevent Dementia ← one of them is looking after your hearing

To this end, we’ve written before about ways to retain (or at least slow the loss of) your hearing, here:

5 Ways To Avoid Hearing Loss

But, what if, despite our best efforts, your hearing is declining regardless, or is already impaired in some way?

Working with the hand we’ve been dealt

So, your hearing is bad and/or deteriorating. Assuming you’ve ruled out possibilities of fixing it, the next step is how to manage this new state of affairs.

One thing to seriously consider, sooner than you think you need to, is using hearing aids. This is because they will not only help you in the obvious practical way, but also, they will slow the associated decline of the parts of your brain that process the language you hear:

ACHIEVE study finds hearing aids cut cognitive decline by 48%

…and here’s the paper itself:

Recruitment and baseline data of the Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders (ACHIEVE) study: A randomized trial of a hearing loss intervention for reducing cognitive decline

Furthermore, hearing aid use can significantly reduce all-cause mortality:

Association between hearing aid use and mortality in adults with hearing loss in the USA: a mortality follow-up study of a cross-sectional cohort

Your ears are not the only organs

Remember, today’s about dealing with hearing loss, not preventing it (for preventing it, see the second link we dropped up top).

With this in mind: do not underestimate the usefulness of learning to lipread.

Lipreading is not a panacea; it has its limitations:

• You can’t lipread an audio-only phonecall, or a podcast, or the radio
• You can’t lipread a video call if the video quality is poor
• You can’t lipread if someone is wearing a mask (as in many healthcare settings)
• You can’t lipread multiple people at once; you have to choose whose mouth to watch (or at least, you will miss the first word(s) each time while switching)
• You can’t lipread during sex if your/their face is somewhere else (may seem like a silly example, but actually communication can be important in sex, and the number of times this writer has had to say “Say again?” in intimate moments is ridiculous)

However, it can also make a huge difference the rest of the time, and can even be a superpower in times/places when other people’s hearing is nullified, such as a noisy environment, or a video call in which someone’s mic isn’t working.

The good news is, it’s really very easy to learn to lipread. There are many valid ways (often involving consciously memorizing mouth-shapes from charts, and then putting them together one by one to build a vocabulary), but this writer recommends a more organic, less effort-intensive approach:

1. Choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, and for which video you already know what is being said (such as by using subtitles first, or a transcript, or perhaps the person is delivering a famous speech or reciting a poem that you know well, or it’s your favorite movie that you’ve watched many times).
2. Now watch it with the sound off (assuming you do normally have some hearing; if you don’t, then you’re probably ahead of the game here) and just pay close attention to the lips. Do this on repeat; soon you’ll be able to “hear” the sounds as you see them made.
3. Now choose a video of someone who speaks clearly, for which video you do not already know what is being said. You’ll probably only get parts of it at first; that’s ok.
4. Now learn the rest of what they said in that video (by reading a transcript or such), and use it like you used the first video.
5. Now repeat steps 3 and 4 until you are lipreading most people easily unless there is some clear obfuscation preventing you.

This process should not take long, as there are only about 44 phonemes (distinct sounds) in English, and once you’ve learned them, you’re set. If you speak more languages, those same 44 phonemes should cover most of most of them, but if not, just repeat the above process with the next language.

Remember, if you have at least some hearing, then most of the time your lipreading and your hearing are going to be working together, and neither will be as strong without the other—but if necessary, well-practised lipreading can indeed often stand in for hearing when hearing isn’t available.

A note on sign language:

Sign language is great, and cool, and useful. However, it’s only as useful as the people who know it, which means that it’s top-tier in the Deaf community (where people will dodge hearing-related cognitive decline entirely, because their social interaction is predominantly signed rather than spoken), and can be useful with close friends or family members who learn it (or at least learn some), but isn’t as useful in most of the wider world when people don’t know it. But if you do want to learn it, don’t let that hold you back—be the change you want to see!

Most of our readers are American, so here’s a good starting place for American Sign Language ← this is a list of mostly-free resources

Enjoy!

Spot The Signs (Because None Of Us Are Immune)

Dementia affects increasingly many people, and unlike a lot of diseases, it disproportionately affects people in wealthy industrialized nations.

There are two main reasons for this:

• Longevity (in poorer countries, more people die of other things sooner; can’t get age-related cognitive decline if you don’t age)
• Lifestyle (in the age of convenience, it has never been easier to live an unhealthy lifestyle)

The former is obviously no bad thing for those of us lucky enough to be in wealthier countries (though even in such places, good healthcare access is of course sadly not a given for all).

The latter, however, is less systemic and more epidemic. But it does cut both ways:

• An unhealthy lifestyle is much easier here, yes
• A healthier lifestyle is much easier here, too!

This then comes down to two factors in turn:

• Information: knowing about dementia, what things lead to it, what to look out for, what to do
• Motivation: priorities, and how much attention we choose to give this matter

So, let’s get some information, and then give it our attention!

More than just memory

It’s easy to focus on memory loss, but the four key disabilities directly caused by dementia (each person may not get all four), can be remembered by the mnemonic: “AAAA!”

No, somebody didn’t just murder your writer. It’s:

• Amnesia: memory loss, in one or more of its many forms
  • e.g. short term memory loss, and/or inability to make new memories
• Aphasia: loss of ability to express oneself, and/or understand what is expressed
  • e.g. “More people have been to Berlin than I have”
  • Or even less communication-friendly, Broca’s (Expressive) Aphasia and Wernicke’s (Receptive) Aphasia
• Apraxia: loss of ability to do things, through no obvious physical disability
  • e.g. staring at the bathroom mirror wondering how to brush one’s teeth
• Agnosia: loss of ability to recognize things
  • e.g. prosopagnosia, also called face-blindness.

If any of those seem worryingly familiar, be aware that while yes, it could be a red flag, what’s most important is patterns of these things.

Another difference between having a momentary brainlapse and having dementia might be, for example, the difference between forgetting your keys, and forgetting what keys do or how to use one.

That said, some are neurological deficits that may show up quite unrelated to dementia, including most of those given as examples above. So if you have just one, then that’s probably worthy of note, but probably not dementia.

Writer’s anecdote: I have had prosopagnosia all my life. To give an example of what that is like and how it’s rather more than just “bad with faces”…

Recently I saw my neighbor, and I could tell something was wrong with her face, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Then some moments later, I realized I had mistaken her hat for her face. It was a large beanie with a panda design on it, and that was facelike enough for me to find myself looking at the wrong face.

Subjective memory matters as much as objective

Objective memory tests are great indicators of potential cognitive decline (or improvement!), but even a subjective idea of having memory problems, that one’s memory is “not as good as it used to be”, can be an important indicator too:

Subjective memory may be marker for cognitive decline

And more recently:

If your memory feels like it’s not what it once was, it could point to a future dementia risk

If you’d like an objective test of memory and other cognitive impairments, here’s the industry’s gold standard test (it’s free):

SAGE: A Test to Detect Signs of Alzheimer’s and Dementia

(The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is designed to detect early signs of cognitive, memory or thinking impairments)

There are things that can look like dementia that aren’t

A person with dementia may be unable to recognize their partner, but hey, this writer knows that feeling very well too. So what sets things apart?

More than we have room for today, but here’s a good overview:

What are the early signs of dementia, and how does it differ from normal aging?

Want to read more?

You might like our previous article more specifically about reducing Alzheimer’s risk:

Reducing Alzheimer’s Risk Early!

Take care!