Did you know that your ears aren’t just to help you hear, but they help you stay steady on your feet, too?
Your vestibular system, housed in your inner ear in the cochlea, is crucial to keeping your balance and maintaining your equilibrium. When you’re dealing with a hearing loss challenge, your balance could also be affected by the damage to your ears.
I recently came across this interesting study by Joseph Sakumura, AuD, and Richard Gans, PhD, which explored the roles of your auditory, vestibular, and cognitive functions in relation to your risk of falling – and found the four all very closely related indeed.
Falls are a significant cause of injury, hospitalization, and death among older adults; if there’s a way to help mitigate that risk by improving your hearing, we’re all ears.
The Study
Sakumura and Gans’s study, which involved almost 600 adults between 18 and 89 years of age, examined the relationship between fall risk and the cognitive, vestibular, and auditory functions.
One main quote caught my eye while reading the study:
“Hearing loss is recognized as the number one modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline. Furthermore, patients with even mild cognitive impairment in domains of; visuo-spatial processing, executive function, memory recall, and reaction times are 14 times more likely to have degraded postural stability and elevated fall risk.”
Hearing evaluations and care are such crucial parts of our work as audiologists, so it’s great to see more and more studies recognizing the power of hearing care and how our hearing affects the rest of our bodies. It’s crucial to look after our hearing, no matter our age, and ensure that it’s working to the levels that we need it to.
By improving your auditory function, you’ll simultaneously give your vestibular and cognitive functions a significant boost. Your cognitive function, to do with memory and recollection of information, relies on your hearing to catch the information you need to hear so that your brain can log the important intel you need. However, if your hearing is struggling, you won’t be able to recall the information you didn’t hear as well.
By looking after your ears with comprehensive hearing care, you’ll stay steady on your feet, remember information better, and mitigate the risks to your brain and body in one fell swoop.
Concerned About Your Hearing or Balance?
You can rest assured that your hearing health is in good hands with our team. With a comprehensive hearing test, you can understand the range of hearing that you’re working with and find out what you need to do to enhance it.
Our team will work with you to help you figure out what’s best for your unique hearing needs and support you as you take control of your hearing health.
Please feel free to get in touch with us to schedule an appointment or raise any questions you’d like answering, and a member of our team will get in touch to help as soon as we can. Alternatively, you can find your closest clinic and give us a call.
