Diabetes, Hearing Loss & You

Diabetes & Hearing Loss: What’s the Deal?

Are hearing impairment and diabetes connected? More than you might think.

Hearing loss — which affects an estimated one of every five Americans — is twice as common among people living with diabetes, making healthy habits and regular hearing checkups all the more important for overall wellness.

Some 30 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, a chronic metabolic disease that isn’t yet curable but can be managed. Controlling blood sugar is crucial to managing the condition, which, if uncontrolled, can lead over time to other problems such as cardiovascular disease, kidney damage, and hearing loss.

Much like age-related hearing loss, diabetes-related hearing issues commonly take a toll on higher-frequency hearing. In addition, people with diabetes can have a harder time hearing speech in noisy environments such as restaurants and parties.

What’s the link between the two conditions?

It’s not yet known …

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The Benefits of Wearing Hearing Aids You’ve Never Heard Of

The Benefits of Wearing Hearing Aids You’ve Never Heard Of

When it comes to communication, hearing is our most important sense — it allows us to gather auditory information during normal day-to-day activities. Hearing not only allows us to socialize, communicate at work, and talk with our loved ones, but it also warns us of potential danger. When our hearing is impaired, it affects our ability to locate where sounds are coming from, and it affects the brain’s ability to know where your body is in proximity to the sounds around you.

Through a process called localization, a person subconsciously uses their hearing to identify the origin of a detected sound, as well as their distance from that sound. The auditory system uses several cues for localization, many of which are affected by a hearing loss.

When the delicate hearing organs in the inner ear are damaged, our ability to detect softer sounds — to understand what those sounds are …

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6 Tips for Adjusting to New Hearing Aids

Make your experience with a new hearing system great with these helpful tips.

Whether you’re a first-time hearing aid user or a longtime wearer, advancements and changes in technology mean your new hearing system will take some time to adjust to — and depending on how outdated your old system was, you may even have an entirely new level of listening clarity!

But this means there’s likely to be an adjustment period for your ears and your brain. Even if you’ve been through this adjustment period before, the tips below can help ease the transition and help you get the most out of every listening experience.

Take it easy at first. Though having new hearing aids means you’ll be hearing better than you have in years, it doesn’t happen immediately. Your hearing system is stimulating nerves that may not have been stimulated in a long while; it takes time for …

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