Protect & Improve Your Hearing & Brain Health | Dr. Konstantina Stankovic

So now there is mounting evidence for a strong link between hearing loss and dementia. It's not that everyone with hearing loss will develop dementia. However, we are trying to identify who is at risk. Hearing loss is a huge problem. It currently affects one and a half billion people and disables half a billion of them.

And the World Health Organization estimates that another billion will be affected by 2050. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Konstantina Stankovich.

She is a medical doctor and researcher and the chair of the Department of Altolyngology, Head and Neck Surgery at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we discuss hearing and how to protect yours, as well as how to deal with common problems related to hearing like tinnitus or wringing of the ears, which is a very debilitating condition that many millions of people suffer from. Most of us don't think about our hearing very often unless it's compromised. And yet we now know that our ability to hear clearly in many ways drives our ability to think and engage with the world, which is, of course, not to say that deaf people don't have excellent cognition and the ability to engage with the world, but they of course compensate for that hearing loss with the use of sign language and lip reading. Most people, of course, have the ability to hear, and yet don't know that even subtle deficits in hearing can lead to focus issues, mild cognitive impairment, and more serious hearing loss is directly related to dementia.

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