Recently, eNeuro magazine published a study from Ohio State University that found that changes in brain activity in young people with mild hearing loss usually occur only when they are old. Early hearing loss is twice as likely as normal people to have dementia. .
Normal conversation or soft background noise, such as the hum of an air conditioner, is about 60 dB. If the long-term is above 85 decibels, 120 decibels or less (such as putting the headphone music sound to the maximum, sitting at a concert or watching a movie close Noise in the vicinity of the speakers may harm hearing. Over 120 dB of noise may directly lead to hearing loss.
Recently, eNeuro magazine published a study from Ohio State University that found that changes in brain activity in young people with mild hearing loss usually occur only when they are old. Early hearing loss is twice as likely as normal people to have dementia. .
Research director Yune Lee said that they recruited 35 participants between the ages of 18 and 41 to agree to a functional MRI scan and listen to sentences of varying complexity.
Researchers are interested in monitoring and comparing brain activity: When listeners have to use a simple structure instead of more complex sentences to process messages, this may involve different types of cognitive efforts.
However, their research has changed because they noticed something surprising for young people.
Some volunteers found slight hearing loss during the baseline test, but Lee and the team did not think too much about it, because these defects do not have enough evidence to exclude these participants.
However, after the fMRI scan, they noticed that the participants with subtle hearing, actually treated their news differently from their peers. Not only that, their brain activity in this area is similar to that of the older audience.
Specifically, healthy young people only use the left hemisphere of the brain to process the information they hear. But those participants who have suffered minor hearing impairments are actually active in both the left and right hemispheres of their brains. In the latter case, Right frontal cortex becomes active - this is something that is usually seen only in elderly people.
Lee explained: 'It's not about the ear, it's about the brain, the cognitive process, it doesn't happen until people are at least 50 years old.'
'The chance of suffering from dementia is twice that of normal people'
The authors of the study stated that healthy young people normally use only the left hemisphere in their language understanding tasks. However, as they grow older, they begin to touch the right brain part of the brain because they work harder. Spoken.
'But in our study, young people with mild hearing loss have already had this phenomenon. Their brains already know that the perception of sound is no longer what it used to be, and the right side begins to compensate for the sound on the left.'
It is difficult to say what effect this will have on these people in later life, but Li and his team are concerned that hearing problems may only worsen and affect understanding. Moreover, this will also accelerate the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia.
'Previous studies have shown that people with mild hearing loss are twice as likely to have dementia, and those with moderate to severe hearing loss are three to five times more likely to have dementia.
For these reasons, Lee suggested that young adults should love hearing more carefully.
