More than 60 million people globally suffer from heart failure – a condition where the heart is unable to pump blood around the body properly, usually because the heart has become weak or stiff.
Coronary heart disease, high blood pressure and obesity are among its typical causes. But how about hearing?
According to a new study published in the journal Heart, hearing loss is indeed linked to a heightened risk of heart failure.
Heart failure doesn’t mean that your heart packs up and stops working altogether. Instead, it means the heart needs extra support to do its job. The condition is a long-term one which, while generally incurable, can be mitigated with treatment.
The new study assessed data from more than 160,000 people from the UK Biobank, none of whom had heart failure to begin with. Around 4,000 of those participants wore hearing aids, while those who didn’t were categorised as having either normal, insufficient or poor hearing, according to the results of a Digit Triplets Test (DTT).
DTTs assess how well someone can understand speech in background noise. Participants’ hearing was also measured using what’s known as a Speech Reception Threshold (SRT).
Over an average follow-up period of 11.5 years, nearly 3 per cent of people in the study developed heart failure.
People with insufficient and poor hearing had a 15 and 28 per cent higher risk of heart failure, respectively, compared to those with normal hearing.
Higher SRT scores – indicating worse hearing – were also linked to a greater risk of heart failure. Interestingly, this association was stronger in individuals who didn’t have heart disease or stroke at the start of the study.
This was an observational study, so it can’t prove that hearing loss causes heart failure – only that the two are strongly linked.
But what could be causing this increased risk?
Many of us lose hearing ability as we age, and without things like hearing aids, this can lead to increasing levels of social isolation, psychological distress and neuroticism – all of which were also found to increase the risk of someone developing heart failure in the study.
According to the study’s authors, this isolating effect may ramp up the body’s stress response, fuel inflammation and damage blood vessels – all of which can put extra pressure on the heart and raise the risk of heart problems.
There could be a more biological link, too. “The rich distribution of capillaries in the cochlea [a cavity in your ear] and the high metabolic demand of the inner ear may render these regions more sensitive to systemic vascular disorders rather than just local circulatory issues,” the study’s authors wrote.
In other words, because the inner ear relies on lots of tiny blood vessels and uses a lot of energy, it might be especially sensitive to problems with blood flow – which means hearing loss could act as an early warning sign of heart trouble, including heart failure.
The researchers also found that people with poor hearing and those who wore hearing aids had a similar increase in heart failure risk – suggesting that while hearing aids help you hear better, they don’t fix the underlying blood flow problems that might be driving that risk.
“These findings suggest that hearing health and psychological well-being should be considered in cardiovascular risk assessment and prevention strategies,” the scientists concluded.
So, while it’s easy to overlook hearing loss as a normal part of ageing, it might just be telling you more about your heart than you think.
Read more: