Back

Hearing Loss as a Modifiable Risk Factor for Dementia

Dichter, A.; Lee, E. J.; Park, T.; Tawk, K.; Ghanbarian, E.; Abouzari, M.

2026-03-18 neurology
10.64898/2026.03.16.26348518 medRxiv
Show abstract

This study evaluated hearing loss (HL) as a potential early indicator of dementia. We analyzed 16,270 participants from the All of Us database (1980 to 2022), including 1,224 (7.5%) with dementia, matched to controls by U.S. census demographics. Severe survey-reported HL showed the strongest association with dementia (odds ratio [OR] 6.76), followed by sensorineural HL (SNHL) (OR 3.90), smoking (OR 1.71), parental HL (OR 1.48), and hypertension (OR 1.48), all p < 0.001. Effect sizes were largest for severe survey-reported HL (1.91) and SNHL (1.36). These findings indicate that severe survey-reported HL and SNHL are strongly associated with dementia.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.