Is this a correlation->causation thing, where people who experience significant hearing loss also experience dementia more than healthier people who have healthy ears and healthy brains?
Anecdotally, I wear hearing aids. I'm always amazed at how much more in contact with the world I feel when wearing them. Without them, all the little background sounds that you perceive are gone. E.g. People chatting. The rustling of your clothes. Birdsong. Running taps. The knocking sound in your car, etc etc. I am totally prepared to believe that the loss of this stimulation increases mental isolation and atrophy.
As a child (with good hearing) I always assumed that I would choose eyesight over hearing if I had to make a choice. Nowadays, it would be a much closer run thing.
Now I'm wondering if this might be a bad idea, neurologically speaking...
However, I do find a sort of peace not wearing my hearing aids. If the house is empty I usually don't put my hearing aids on for hours in the morning.
My father in law got a dementia diagnosis, after this my wife and I started going with him to his appointments - and discovered why he had such a diagnosis. He's the type of person who'll nod and pretend to hear/understand when he doesn't. We know this just from our interactions with him. The tool they use to eval is verbal question/answer and he did much better on the evals when we were with him and keyed the doctor in on that they ensure he hears the question or they give it to him in written form.
"Participants were randomly assigned (1:1) to a hearing intervention (audiological counselling and provision of hearing aids) or a control intervention of health education (individual sessions with a health educator covering topics on chronic disease prevention) and followed up every 6 months." from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...