Researchers led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health randomly assigned nearly 1,000 older adults with hearing loss to either hearing aids or a health education program, then tracked their cognitive test scores for three years.
Across the full study group, hearing aids made no measurable difference in three-year cognitive decline. But in a prespecified comparison, among older, higher-risk adults drawn from an established heart-health cohort, hearing aid use slowed cognitive decline by about 48 percent compared with the control group.
The split result came from combining two groups of volunteers in one trial: a healthier group that sought out the study on its own, which showed no benefit, and an older, higher-risk group recruited from a long-running cardiovascular study, which showed a large one. Researchers now want to identify in advance which patients most resemble the second group.
Read the original study
Lin et al., The Lancet, 2023 · doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)01406-X
One hearing aid trial, two very different results.
Source
- Lin, F. R., Pike, J. R., Albert, M. S., Arnold, M., Burgard, S., Chisolm, T., Couper, D., Deal, J. A., Goman, A. M., Glynn, N. W., Gmelin, T., Gravens-Mueller, L., Hayden, K. M., Huang, A. R., Knopman, D., Mitchell, C. M., Mosley, T., Pankow, J. S., Reed, N. S., . . . ACHIEVE Collaborative Research Group (2023). Hearing intervention versus health education control to reduce cognitive decline in older adults with hearing loss in the USA (ACHIEVE): a multicentre, randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 402(10404), 786–797. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)01406-X