Hearing Aids May Reduce Risk of Depression, Anxiety, Dementia in Older Adults

Older adults who use hearing aids may be less likely to develop depression, anxiety, and dementia for at least three years after a hearing loss diagnosis compared with those who do not begin using hearing aids, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. In addition, these individuals appear less likely to get injured in a fall.

“By providing enhanced hearing input, HAs [hearing aids] may facilitate greater social engagement, lower levels of effort to recognize sounds and speech, lower levels of depression or anxiety symptoms, higher levels of physical balance, and greater feelings of independence and self-efficacy,” wrote Elham Mahmoudi, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Michigan.

Mahmoudi and colleagues examined insurance claims data from 114,862 adults aged 66 and older who received a hearing loss diagnosis between 2008 and 2013. All the adults included in the analysis remained on the same coverage—a Medicare managed care plan that includes partial coverage for hearing aids—for at least three years after receiving the diagnosis of hearing loss.

The analysis showed that about 11% of women and 13% of men diagnosed with hearing loss began using hearing aids. Over the next three years, the adults who used hearing aids had an 18% reduced risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s/dementia, 11% reduced risk of being diagnosed with anxiety or depression, and a 13% reduced risk of having an injurious fall compared with adults without hearing aids.

“Although [hearing aids] are expensive, the medical costs of many conditions that could be prevented or delayed by using [hearing aids] are substantially more expensive,” the authors concluded. “Any delay in diagnosis of [Alzheimer’s] or dementia could not only lead to large cost savings, but also improve the health and well-being of older adults.”

To read more about this topic, see the American Journal of Psychiatry article “Sensation and Psychiatry: Linking Age-Related Hearing Loss to Late-Life Depression and Cognitive Decline.”

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Insomnia Symptoms, Sleep Medications Increase Risk of Falls in Seniors

The more insomnia symptoms an older adult reports, the greater their risk of future falls, according to a study published in the journal Sleep. This risk appears to be even greater in older adults who took physician-recommended sleep medications.

“Multiple insomnia complaints are common among older adults, and our findings suggest that investigating a single insomnia symptom may underestimate the impact of multiple co-existing insomnia symptoms on fall risk,” wrote Orfeu Buxton, Ph.D., and colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Healthy Aging.


Buxton and colleagues analyzed data from the 2006 through 2014 versions of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), an ongoing national study that interviews older adults every two years on a variety of health and lifestyle topics. The HRS includes sleep-related questions such as whether the participants have trouble “falling asleep,” “waking up during the night,” “waking up too early and not being able to fall asleep again,” and “not feeling rested during the day.” The researchers compiled answers from participants aged 65 and older to create a composite insomnia score of 0-4 for each respondent. As part of the HRS interview, participants were also asked whether they had fallen since the previous assessment (last two years).

They found that a higher insomnia score correlated with a future risk of falling. Specifically, older adults were 5% more likely to report a fall for each insomnia symptom they had. In addition, adults who used physician-recommended sleep medications were approximately 34% more likely to report a fall at the survey two years later compared with adults who did not use sleep medications. Interestingly, nonphysician-recommended sleep medications showed no association with falls at follow up.

“It is … important for clinicians to screen older adults for the presence of insomnia and make a referral to a specialist in sleep disorders if needed,” Buxton and colleagues wrote. “CBT-I [cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia] has been found to be effective in treating insomnia among older adults and in sustaining the effects longer compared with sleep medications or other treatments … with potentially fewer side effects for falls.”

For related information, see the Psychiatric News article “Online CBT for Insomnia Offers Long-Term Benefit.”

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Zolpidem Increases Inpatient Falls, Study Finds

Use of the hypnotic agent zolpidem in inpatient hospital settings significantly increases the risk that a patient will fall. Reporting yesterday in the Early View Journal of Hospital Medicine, researchers based at the Mayo Clinic's Center for Sleep Medicine in Rochester, Minn., said that the fall rate among patients who were prescribed and received zolpidem was significantly greater than among patients who were prescribed but did not receive zolpidem. The patients who were taking zolpidem who experienced a fall did not differ from other hospitalized adult patients who fell in terms of age and use of opioids, antidepressants, sedative-antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepine, or antihistamines. "Zolpidem use was a strong, independent, and potentially modifiable risk factor for inpatient falls," they concluded. 

Researchers at the Scripps Clinic Viterbi Family Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif., recently found that patients with prescriptions for hypnotics such as zolpidem had approximately 4.6 times the hazard of dying over an average observation period of 2.5 years, compared with nonusers of these drugs. Read more about that study in the Journal Digest feature of Psychiatric News here. 

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