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Comment by reso | Hacker News Reader

Dementia is also highly correlated with hearing loss. It's intuitive to me that the mind could deteriorate when it loses touch with the outside world. It seems possible that dementia is much less a material deterioration in the brain than a condition that takes place when the brain loses its normal sensory stimuli.

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Anosmia (loss of sense of smell) is also linked to dementia. [0]

I wonder if it's a coincidence that declining vision, hearing, and smell are all linked to dementia, while the optic, vestibulocochlear, and olfactory nerves make up 3 of the 12 cranial nerves, [1] meaning they emerge directly from the brain.

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[0]: https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/loss-smell-linked-alzheimers-co...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranial_nerves

Anosmia was one of the symptoms of Covid too, as I read at the time of peak Covid.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7488171/

Zinc deficiency is also associated with anosmia, and is also associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Zinc will also lower insulin via the IDE enzyme.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883601/#:~:tex....

https://alzres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13195-021....

Saw comment late, but thanks. Will check those.

It is, and it is terrible. Whatever you eat is bland and you cannot smell anything.

Wow.

We have seen people bounce back from early signs of dementia after cataract surgery.

I'd bet older people who have trouble seeing are more likely to be depressed and depressed people score higher (more likely to be) on dementia tests.

I've seen tons of things like family and active social lives helping with the disease but I bet it's just negative emotion and depressive symptoms make it worse rather than those things make it better.

There has to be more to this, since blind and deaf people exist and function in society. There may be direct correlations here, but there are definitely more factors involved.

I wonder if it has to do with the timing of the loss, and whether the loss happens at the same time as other losses.

For instance, if you have an accident and become blind as a teenager, but are otherwise fine, 1) you still have a fair degree of neuroplasticity, but 2) things in your life are generally getting better, which can encourage you to think your current situation will improve too (i.e., you'll cope better, even if you never see again).

If you become blind in your later years while everything else is declining, it makes sense that your prospects for improvement would be much lower.

The implied correlation and statistics here feels suspicious. Can they also say “we have seen people bounce back from early signs of dementia after getting eyeglasses” ?

Yes, this was my dad. He went from very healthy, active and social to suddenly aloof and reserved. People from his generation in India have a thing against regular medical checkups and only visit doctors when something is wrong. The visual degradation from his cataract was so gradual and severe but he failed to notice that. After I dragging him to a GP, he got his diagnosis in 5 minutes. He had a cataract surgery the same week and he was like 10 years younger instantaneously.

Fuzzier stimuli, fuzzier adapted reality...

Yikes.

Makes one wonder what one has unconsciously assimilated to.

My grandma was nearly completely blind due to macular degeneration from her early 70s, but she was sharp as a tack until she lost her hearing in her late 90s (this was also aggravated by covid-related isolation).

It would be interesting to see studies that compared the affects of different sensory losses, especially including when the loss occurred.

I've never heard anything about this, but are dementia rates higher among those who are congenitally without one of their senses?

from https://www.nextavenue.org/determining-the-best-care-for-her...:

"Hope Lanter, lead audiologist for Hear.com, says that because people with congenital deafness don't have access to sound, "the dementia risk is not strongly correlated due to the brain not encountering a change in stimulation that occurs with late deafened adults."

However, congenitally deaf people do wear hearing aids and have access to some, or many, sounds. But there is apparently little to no research that has assessed the dementia risk for this marginalized group.

"There are no studies that I know of that confirm a higher risk of dementia for Deaf individuals," said Melissa Karp, a doctor of audiology with the Audiology & Hearing Services of Charlotte, located in Charlotte, North Carolina. "Members of the Deaf community have their own language with structure, syntax and interactions with others. You would also have to tease out other factors like genetics and socioeconomic status before making that determination.""

I think this makes sense. If your brain has been relying on your sense of hearing for certain information your whole life, any new damage to that ability will leave your brain without that information. If you've never been able to hear, your brain has no dependence on sound for information.

I wonder if the cognitive dropoff for Deaf people who get cataracts is more or less severe than for hearing people who get them, since presumably they're even more reliant on their sight for information than hearing people are.

from https://rnid.org.uk/hearing-research/hearing-loss-and-dement...:

"There is strong evidence to show that:

- hearing is an essential part of brain health - mild hearing loss doubles the risk of developing dementia - moderate hearing loss leads to three times the risk - severe hearing loss increases the risk five times."

also, from https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/hearing-loss-and-the-demen...:

"Hearing loss is estimated to account for 8% of dementia cases. This means that hearing loss may be responsible for 800,000 of the nearly 10 million new cases of dementia diagnosed each year."

Sadly this bodes ill for the people suffering hearing loss from COVID vaccines. And STILL you have lowlives trying to bury this information (there's one in this thread). Why?

Try living with a 9 kHz tone in your ear 24/7. Tell National Geographic, NBC, hearing experts, vaccine researchers, and thousands of victims that it's "made up."

Hurry and "flag" this. Bury the information as fast as you can, so more people get hurt.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/covid-va...

https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/can-the...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8443418/

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220523/Pfizer-COVID-19-v...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/tinnitus-rare-sid...

Facebook group for victims, with several thousand members: https://www.facebook.com/groups/265035901879921/

Don't try to pretend this is "anti-vax," because if the afflicted people hadn't gotten the vaccine, they wouldn't have discovered this side effect. In my case, it was a nearly useless second booster, which I never would have gotten if I had access to the information to weigh the risks and benefits. THAT is the huge crime in covering this up, and yes, it has been covered up. People could have opted to use N95 masks more diligently, for example, and skipped mostly-ineffectual boosters.

This is HN, mate. You have to forget about common sense and having a serious discussion here.

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