Neuron: What exactly is hearing loss that causes Alzheimer's disease?

10, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Neuron, scientists from Newcastle University and others revealed how hearing loss can trigger dementia, and researchers believe that addressing it early may help prevent it.
Photo Source: CC0 Public Domain In an epidemiological study, researchers found that hearing loss is associated with dementia, and that the condition causes one-tenth of the 47 million cases of dementia worldwide; in this study, researchers proposed a new theory to reveal why ear impairments induce Alzheimer's disease, an explanation that researchers hope will help scientists delve deeper into the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease and effectively predict the risk of developing alzheimer's disease in the future. in the
article, the researchers considered three key areas: 1) hearing loss and the underlying causes of dementia; 2) lack of hearing-related input that causes brain atrophy; and 3) cognitive impairment, which causes patients to use more brain resources to compensate for hearing loss, which cannot be used for other tasks.
researchers have come up with a new perspective, focusing on memory centers deep in the brain's temporal lobes, and recently found that brain temporal lobe tissue, which is often associated with long-term memory of places and events, may also be involved in the short-term storage and processing of auditory information.
researchers have revealed how changes in brain activity caused by hearing loss directly contribute to the formation of abnormal proteins that trigger Alzheimer's disease.
Professor Tim Griffiths said the challenge of the study was to explain how ear disorders induce brain degradation, a theory based on the molecular mechanisms of the memory system in the brain when hearing difficulties occur in real-world environments; brain memory systems involved in hearing difficulties are often the most common places where Alzheimer's disease occurs, and changes in brain memory system activity induced by hearing loss and Alzheimer's disease are often triggered by each other. the
researchers point out that we still need to conduct in-depth mechanism research on pathological models to test whether the proposed theory is correct, the researchers combined a variety of human studies and animal models of the study put forward this theory with hearing loss is important, and later they will continue to study the molecular level to clarify the body's hearing loss in what way is linked to the occurrence of Alzheimer's disease.
() Original source: Timothy D. Griffiths, Meher Lad, Sukhbinder Kumar, et al. How Can Hearing Loss Cause Dementia?, Neuron (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.08.003.