What surface is the most friendly to the flu virus? Where’s the best place to stand when you’re talking to a sick person? And how are Australians curbing germs in schools?
With contributions from Laura Geggel and Tara Parker-Pope.
You’ve probably heard the stat before: The cost of living is twice as high in New York as it is in the rest of the country. In the Council for Community and Economic Research’s latest cost of living report, we find out exactly what that means, and what the biggest distortions are.
The council collects price data from 307 urban areas. It found that for the first three quarters of 2012, the after-tax cost for a professional/managerial standard of living in Manhattan was 225.4 percent of that for the nation. That made Manhattan once again the most expensive place to live. In second place was Brooklyn (178.6 percent of the national average), followed by Honolulu (167 percent), San Francisco (163.4 percent) and San Jose, Calif. (153.4 percent).
By far, the biggest culprit in driving up Manhattan’s cost of living was housing. The organization’s index of housing costs is 455.2 percent of the national average. The other cost of living categories were also higher in Manhattan than in the rest of the country, by the cost differential was not nearly as great.
| Category | Manhattan Price as a Percentage of National Average |
| Composite | 225.6% |
| Grocery | 149.9% |
| Housing | 455.2% |
| Utilities | 129.0% |
| Transportation | 123.5% |
| Health | 129.4% |
| Miscellaneous | 148.5% |
Here is a selection of the average price data from some of the 60 specific categories they track:
| Item | Manhattan Average Price | National Average Price |
| Chunk Light Tuna | $1.53 | $0.99 |
| Whole Milk | $2.34 | $2.26 |
| Soft Drink | $2.00 | $1.56 |
| Apartment Rent | $3,902.10 | $869.83 |
| Dentist Visit | $106.18 | $84.93 |
| Lipitor | $189.42 | $178.23 |
| Pizza | $10.88 | $8.99 |
| Toothpaste | $4.08 | $2.52 |
| Dry Cleaning | $13.70 | $11.01 |
| Man’s Dress Shirt | $40.91 | $26.05 |
| Movie | $13.33 | $9.19 |
| Veterinary Services | $99.53 | $45.53 |
As with any cost-of-living index, the comparisons are imperfect. For example, some of the items that the Council for Community and Economic Research includes in its index are much pricier in Manhattan than elsewhere, but probably don’t enter Manhattanites’ daily expenses too frequently — things like tennis balls, bowling or even gasoline.
There’s another major issue when comparing costs of living in different cities: a lot of the amenities of various cities are not captured by the prices of individual goods. Stores and restaurants are open later in New York, for example. There are probably more top-notch restaurants in Manhattan than just about anywhere else in the United States. These amenities might push other prices (like rents, or for that matter goods sold in stores that have to pay high rents) higher, so that it’s not a true apples-to-apples comparison to look at prices in Manhattan against those in Buffalo or Toledo. Economists disagree about how to adjust for these factors when calculating cost-of-living comparisons.
One new paper by Rebecca Diamond (a Harvard Ph.D. student who is one of the stars on this year’s economic job market) tries to take into account the value of these hidden higher amenities. Her research suggests that when you weigh rising amenities against rising costs in some of the highest-skilled cities in America, it actually turns out that higher-skilled people who have access to these better amenities have an even better standard of living than the standard cost-of-living adjustment would show. She also finds that welfare inequality between higher-skilled and lower-skilled workers is greater than the already-wide wage gap alone suggests.
Another recent paper (by Jessie Handbury of Wharton) also tries to take the relative tastes of rich versus poor people into account. It finds that New York is indeed an expensive place to live if you’re poor, but in a way is actually a relatively cheap place to live if you’re rich and have standard rich-person tastes (e.g., Whole Foods might be the only place in town for to buy organic free-range chicken in a place like Little Rock, Ark., whereas there’s more price competition for high-end food in New York).
One final note: The pricing figures from the Council for Community and Economic Research are different from those in the Consumer Price Index reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau’s monthly report reflects spending patterns for all urban consumers and for urban wage earners and clerical workers, and has data from only a couple of dozen broad metropolitan areas (as opposed to the 307 geographically narrower urban areas).
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who made history last year as the first double amputee runner to compete in the Olympics using prosthetic blades, will spend the night in jail Thursday after he was charged with murder in the death of his girlfriend at his house, prosecutors said.
The National Prosecuting Authority said Pistorius would remain in custody until his hearing Friday, when police intend to oppose bail.
Reeva Steenkamp, a 30-year-old model, died after being shot several times in the head and arm in Pistorius’ house in an upscale suburb in Pretoria.
PHOTOS: Pistorius in the London Olympics
Pistorius was ushered from the home by police Thursday morning with a gray hoodie covering his head and obscuring most of his face.
South Africans were in shock about the accusation against Pistorius, who became a hero during his long battle for the right to compete in the Olympics. After a controversy on whether the blades he uses to walk and run gave him an advantage in races, Pistorius was granted the right to compete in the London 2012 Olympic Games.
South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of murder and violent crime, and many South Africans keep guns at home to guard against intruders.
The Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld suggested that Pistorius mistook his girlfriend for a burglar and killed her accidentally.
However, a police spokeswoman, Brig. Denise Beukes, said police were “surprised” at reports the killing was accidental, adding that that version hadn’t come from police, according to the South African Press Assn.
"I confirm there had been previous incidents of a domestic nature at his place,” said Beukes, adding that police couldn’t comment on the decision to oppose bail.
Beukes said police had interviewed neighbors who heard sounds at Pistorius’ home earlier in the evening, and also at the time the incident reportedly took place.
Pistorius’ father, Henke Pistorius, said his son was sad. But the older Pistorius said he didn’t know the facts.
“I don’t know nothing. It will be extremely obnoxious and rude to speculate,” he said in a radio interview. “If anyone makes a statement, it will have to be Oscar.”
An advertisement for Nike, one of Pistorius’ major sponsors, was removed from his official website Thursday. It had shown the athlete in a green lycra athletic suit and the slogan, “I am the bullet in the chamber."
ALSO:
Six arrested in Acapulco rape case
Iranian general reportedly assassinated while traveling from Syria
British case of new virus suggests person-to-person transmission
For most of the 20th century, animals weren’t allowed to have emotions. Your dog didn’t actually love you—it (and it was an “it” back then) was just a stimulus–response machine conditioned to act a specific way in a specific situation. Scientists who said otherwise—that animals actually had minds capable of thoughts and emotions—were accused of “anthropomorphizing” and ridiculed by their peers. Even researchers as famous as chimp specialist Jane Goodall spent years sitting on evidence that animals could do more than just salivate at the sound of a bell.
But over time, that bias waned. Just consider the first sentence (and the title) of Virginia Morell’s new book, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures: “Animals have minds.”
“Not so long ago,” she writes later, “I would have hedged these statements.” After six years of reporting in 11 different countries, the longtime science journalist arrived at the same conclusion that scientists like Goodall have known for a long while: that animals feel. And strongly, it turns out.
But how complex are these emotions? Fear and panic are one thing; but do animals lust, even love? We went to Morell for some answers. Animals might not celebrate Valentine’s Day, but their relationships still look a lot like ours. Here are some of her favorite examples.
Parrot porn, anyone? That’s what Morell was treated to in Venezuela, where scientists are studying the calls of green-rumped parrotlets. One of their racier findings? Little birds be bangin’ like mammals: pushing, clawing, clutching, thrusting. But that’s not all. These parrots lead soap opera–ready lives.
“They were very, very fun to watch,” Morell said.
In one of her favorite stories, a parrot widow gets remarried to a neighbor, only to have her new husband leave her a day later for his first wife. Bad General Parrotreus! All that drama is meticulously documented in a field log, which Morell calls “a parrotlet version of Desperate Housewives.”
Photo: Male (right) and female (left) green-rumped parrotlets. Ninoska Zamora/Flickr.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actor, writer and comedian Steve Martin has become a dad for the first time at age 67 – and managed to keep it secret from the media for more than a month.
Martin and his second wife, Anne Stringfield, 41, “are new parents and recently welcomed a child,” a spokeswoman for the actor said on Wednesday.
The spokeswoman gave no details, including the sex of the child or the date of birth. But the New York Post cited unidentified sources as saying the baby arrived in December.
The multi-talented Martin, whose career as a writer and performer dates back more than 45 years, has played a father in movies such as “Parenthood,” Cheaper by the Dozen,” and “Father of the Bride.”
Martin, who has hosted the Oscars ceremony three times, married Stringfield, a former writer at the New Yorker magazine, in 2007. His eight-year marriage to British actress Victoria Tennant ended in divorce in 1994.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey: Editing by Jill Serjeant and Peter Cooney)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
The F.D.A. Approves a Bionic Eye:
The Argus II allows Barbara Campbell, who lost her sight 20 years ago, to see the world through patterns of light. Scientists hope it is the beginning of even more treatments.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”
With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters.
The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain. The F.D.A. approval covers this integrated system, which the manufacturer calls Argus II.
The approval marks the first milestone in a new frontier in vision research, a field in which scientists are making strides with gene therapy, optogenetics, stem cells and other strategies.
“This is just the beginning,” said Grace Shen, director of the retinal diseases program at the National Eye Institute, which helped finance the artificial retina research and is supporting many other blindness therapy projects. “We have a lot of exciting things sitting in the wings, multiple approaches being developed now to address this.”
With the artificial retina or retinal prosthesis, a blind person cannot see in the conventional sense, but can identify outlines and boundaries of objects, especially when there is contrast between light and dark — fireworks against a night sky or black socks mixed with white ones in the laundry.
“Without the system, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all, and if you were in front of me and you moved left and right, I’m not going to realize any of this,” said Elias Konstantopolous, 74, a retired electrician in Baltimore, one of about 50 Americans and Europeans who have been using the device in clinical trials for several years. He said it helps him differentiate curbs from asphalt roads, and detect contours, but not details, of cars, trees and people. “When you don’t have nothing, this is something. It’s a lot.”
The F.D.A. approved Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products, to treat people with severe retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited diseases in which photoreceptor cells, which take in light, deteriorate.
The first version of the implant had a sheet of 16 electrodes, but the current version has 60. A tiny camera mounted on eyeglasses captures images, and the video processor, worn on a belt, translates those images into pixelized patterns of light and dark. The processor transmits those signals to the electrodes, which send them along the optic nerve to the brain.
About 100,000 Americans have retinitis pigmentosa, but initially between 10,000 and 15,000 will likely qualify for the Argus II, according to the company. The F.D.A. says that up to 4,000 people a year can be treated with the device. That number represents people who are older than 25, who once had useful vision, have evidence of an intact inner retinal layer, have at best very limited light perception in the retina, and are so visually impaired that the device would prove an improvement. Second Sight will begin making Argus II available later this year.
But experts said the technology holds promise for other people who are blind, especially those with advanced age-related macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss in older people, affecting about two million Americans. About 50,000 of them are currently severely impaired enough that the artificial retina would be helpful, said Dr. Robert Greenberg, Second Sight’s president and chief executive.
In Europe, Argus II received approval in 2011 to treat a broader group of people, those with severe blindness caused by any type of outer retinal degeneration, not just retinitis pigmentosa, although it is currently only marketed in Europe for that condition. In the U.S., additional clinical trials need to be completed before the company can seek broader FDA approval.
Eventually, Dr. Greenberg said, the plan is to implant electrodes not in the eye, but directly into the brain’s visual cortex. “That would allow us to address blindness from all causes,” he said.
David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, is answering readers’ questions about the economic landscape and President Obama’s prospects to enact the ambitious legislative agenda he laid out in his State of the Union address.
Mr. Leonhardt is the author of the e-book, “Here’s the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth,” published by The Times and Byliner. Previously, he wrote the paper’s Economic Scene column.
Below are answers to selected readers' questions.
Q.
When the debt was the largest in history as a percent of GDP, in 1946, we had 27 years of mostly deficit spending. The debt in dollars doubled. But we had prosperity. Why don't we do that today?
— Len Charlap, Princeton, NJ
A. You're right that a country can have deficits and still pay down its debt, so long as the deficits are small enough and economic growth fast enough. And you're right that some government spending plays a crucial role in creating economic growth. The most important programs seem to be investments -- in education, scientific research, roads, bridges and the like -- that the private sector won't do on its own.
The Internet, the radio, the jet engine, much of biotechnology and the technique for extracting a form of natural gas known as shale gas all owe their beginnings to federal spending. This history is a major theme in "Here's the Deal."
But government spending and debt most certainly do not ensure prosperity. Federal debt is already high. The projections showing that annual deficits will fall in the next few years depend on some assumptions that may prove rosy. And as more baby boomers retire and health costs keep rising, projected deficits are projected to rise again, sharply, in coming decades.
As heartening as the recent progress on the deficit may be, the country still faces substantial long-term fiscal problems. If we don't deal with them, we are likely to have an economy that looks nothing like the prosperous economy after World War II.
Q.
Congressional Republicans recently decided against using the debt limit as a lever to force President Obama to enact spending cuts he wouldn't otherwise go along with. Is there any indication that Republicans will agree to a longer-term extension once the current limit is reached?
A. It's hard to know, but it's possible that the debt-ceiling fights will not continue. In the past, the extension of the debt ceiling tended to be an opportunity for the party that didn't hold the White House to grandstand about the deficit and debt. (President Obama, somewhat famously, did so in 2006.) In the end, though, the extension tended to pass without any concessions from the president.
In 2011, Congressional Republicans successfully negotiated such concessions from Mr. Obama. In recent months, he made clear that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling again, citing the economic damage from the uncertainty over the last extension. Republicans have gone along, at least temporarily.
Polls suggest the last fight hurt Republicans more than Democrats, which suggests Republicans may ultimately agree to a long-term extension or simply a series of short-term extensions. On the other hand, they were indeed able to win some spending cuts in 2011, so some in the party continue to see the debt ceiling as a powerful tool.
The most cliched last line in journalism -- the kicker, as we say -- is: Time will tell. I can't think of another kicker here.
Q.
Why has the administration given so much focus to gun control in the past few weeks? With a Republican majority in the House and the fact that many Democrats would also vote against advanced gun control measures, would this kind of legislation have a chance of passing the House or the Senate?
A. Unlike past mass shootings, the killings in Newtown, Conn., shifted the national debate. Public opinion changed modestly, and Democrats who favor more gun control became more willing to push for it.
As you note, most Republicans and some Democrats oppose sweeping new measures, which is why an assault-weapons ban still seems unlikely. But some other measures may be able to win overwhelming support from Democrats and enough from Republicans to pass both the House and Senate. The two leading candidates are an expansion of criminal background checks on people buying guns and a new federal trafficking law to block criminal purchases.
A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 85 percent of Americans favor background checks. Support at so high of a level, combined with national attention to the issues, has the potential to create a majority in both houses of Congress.
Q.
The Wall Street macro indexes e.g. S&P500, DOW, are at or around historical highs. However I do not see corresponding growth in GDP let alone increase in employment rate to underpin this rally.
What is driving this and where is the money coming from? How does this benefit "middle America"?
— Arthur CHAN, Wilmington, DE
A. First, the indexes themselves are not at or near record highs when viewed properly. When adjusted for inflation, the Standard & Poor 500 index was more than 30 percent higher in 2000 than it is today. Including the value of dividends, the S&P was still about 5 percent higher in 2000 than now. And taking into investment costs, which nearly everyone pays, the gap would be substantially more than 5 percent.
I say this not to be an inflation nerd (though I am) but to make the point that the stock market is not in fact more valuable than it’s ever been. When Wall Street proclaims, “record high!” and we in the media repeat the claim, we’re presenting a false picture of reality. Stocks are still not as valuable as they were at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
Your larger point, though, is dead on. The S&P 500 (including dividends and inflation) is about 18 percent higher than it was five years ago, which is roughly when the recession began. The overall economy has not fared nearly so well. Gross domestic product was only about 2 percent larger at the end of last year than five years earlier. The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent, up from 5 percent five years ago.
For a complex stew of reasons – including, but not limited to, government assistance for the financial sector since 2007 – American companies and financial firms have recovered more quickly from the crisis than most of the rest of the economy.
Q.
What are President Obama's plans to lure high-tech manufacturing back to the United States?
He courts Silicon Valley and named Apple during his State of the Union, but Steve Jobs famously said manufacturing will never return for logistical reasons. Tim Cook, despite the return of a single Mac line, appears to have little desire to change the company's strategic plan.
A. My colleague Annie Lowrey responds:
After what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called "a bittersweet night," investigators Wednesday were in the process of identifying the human remains found in the charred cabin where fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was believed to have been holed up after trading gunfire with officers, authorities said.
If the body is identified as Dorner’s, the standoff would end a weeklong manhunt for the ex-LAPD officer and Navy Reserve lieutenant suspected in a string of shootings following his firing by the Los Angeles Police Department several years ago. Four people have died in the case, allegedly at Dorner’s hands.
Beck said he would not consider the manhunt over until the body was identified as Dorner. Police remained on tactical alert and were conducting themselves as if nothing had changed in the case, officials said.
PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer
The latest burst of gunfire came Tuesday after the suspect, attempting to flee law enforcement officials, fatally shot a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and seriously injured another, officials said. He then barricaded himself in a wooden cabin outside Big Bear, not far from ski resorts in the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, according to police.
"This could have ended much better, it could have ended worse," said Beck as he drove to the hospital where the injured deputy was located. "I feel for the family of the deputy who lost his life."
The injured deputy is expected to survive but it is anticipated he will need several surgeries. The names of the two deputies have not been released.
TIMELINE: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer
Just before 5 p.m., authorities smashed the cabin's windows, pumped in tear gas and called for the suspect to surrender, officials said. They got no response. Then, using a demolition vehicle, they tore down the cabin's walls one by one. When they reached the last wall, they heard a gunshot. Then the cabin burst into flames, officials said.
Last week, authorities said they had tracked Dorner to a wooded area near Big Bear Lake. They found his torched gray Nissan Titan with several weapons inside, the said, and the only trace of Dorner was a short trail of footprints in newly fallen snow.
DOCUMENT: Read the manifesto
The manifesto vows "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against law enforcement officers and their families. "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. I do not fear death as I died long ago," it said.
On Tuesday morning, two maids entered a cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive and ran into a man who they said resembled the fugitive, a law enforcement official said. The cabin was not far from where Dorner's singed truck had been found and where police had been holding news conferences about the manhunt.
The man tied up the maids, and he took off in a purple Nissan parked near the cabin, the official said. About 12:20 p.m., one of the maids broke free and called police.
FULL COVERAGE: Sweeping manhunt for ex-cop
Nearly half an hour later, officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the stolen vehicle and called for backup, authorities said. The suspect turned down a side road in an attempt to elude the officers but crashed the vehicle, police said.
A short time later, authorities said, the suspect carjacked a light-colored pickup truck. Allan Laframboise said the truck belonged to his friend Rick Heltebrake, who works at a nearby Boy Scout camp.
Heltebrake was driving on Glass Road with his Dalmatian, Suni, when a hulking African American man stepped into the road, Laframboise said. Heltebrake stopped. The man told him to get out of the truck.
INTERACTIVE MAP: Searching for suspected shooter
"Can I take my dog?" Heltebrake asked, according to his friend.
So. You guys have really, really strong opinions about the Battle of Hoth.
Many took issue with my argument that Hoth represented a military debacle for the Galactic Empire. Some questioned the (meta)factual premises of my case (are TIE Fighters even capable of in-atmospheric flight?). Others argued that Vader was deliberately trying to lose, rendering my essay myopic. Still others desired to travel back in time and physically accost my childhood self, so as to spare me the error of even thinking about Hoth. Anger, fear, aggression: the dark side are they.
My responses are less interesting than those that others can provide. So we at Danger Room widened the aperture and brought in six military nerds — soldiers, academics, bloggers — with a similarly abiding love for Star Wars. Some agree with me, most disagree with me, and all add keen insights, except for when they disagree with me. In any event, check out their thoughts on Hoth, for the Force is strong with them.
If Hoth was a defeat for Darth Vader, as Spencer Ackerman contends, it was a short-lived one at best. Thanks to well-conceived contingency plans, and a judicious use of nefarious private military contractors, Darth Vader was still well along the path to achieving his ultimate strategic objective: turning Luke Skywalker to the Dark Side of the Force, and finally overthrowing the Emperor. Of course, Vader’s agenda only tangentially marries up with that of the Imperial Forces at large, and is cross-purposes with that of the Emperor. Thus, Vader’s true objective in the attack on Hoth is not the destruction of the Rebel Alliance, but rather, capturing Luke. In many ways, Darth Vader is a one-man shadow government, who seeks to find and shelter the religious extremist responsible for the greatest terrorist act ever perpetrated against the Empire–all to further his own personal political agenda.
Luke Skywalker may have escaped to Dagobah, sure, but Yoda saves Vader the expense and hassle of having to train young Luke. In fact, Luke’s escape actually gives Vader plausible deniability when Emperor Palpatine confronts Vader via hologram on Luke’s paternity.
Vader’s true strategic failure comes not at Hoth, but at Bespin, when he fails to turn Luke to the Dark Side. By the next film, Vader’s been removed from field command, relegated to overseeing defense contractors working on yet another flawed and bloated acquisitions program. And of course, in Return of the Jedi, it’s Emperor Palpatine’s turn to take the offensive, using Luke to dispatch his weakened apprentice, and carry on the Sith legacy. In Star Wars, intergalactic civil war is little more than a vehicle to advance the grand plan of the Sith.
Major Crispin J. Burke is a US Army Aviator who blogs at Wings Over Iraq. Follow him on Twitter at @CrispinBurke.
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 View All
At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.
A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant.
Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response.
Katherine Bouton speaks about her own experience with hearing loss.
A transcript of this interview can be found here.
Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.
In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss.
“Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.
In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia.
In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.
Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use.
What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.
The work of John T. Cacioppo, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, also offers a clue to a pathological link. His multidisciplinary studies on isolation have shown that perceived isolation, or loneliness, is “a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation.” Those with hearing loss, who may sit through a dinner party and not hear a word, frequently experience perceived isolation.
Other research, including the Framingham Heart Study, has found an association between hearing loss and another unexpected condition: cardiovascular disease. Again, the evidence suggests a common pathological cause. Dr. David R. Friedland, a professor of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, hypothesized in a 2009 paper delivered at a conference that low-frequency loss could be an early indication that a patient has vascular problems: the inner ear is “so sensitive to blood flow” that any vascular abnormalities “could be noted earlier here than in other parts of the body.”
A common pathological cause might help explain why hearing aids do not seem to reduce the risk of dementia. But those of us with hearing loss hope that is not the case; common sense suggests that if you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you have greater cognitive power to listen and understand — and remember. And the sense of perceived isolation, another risk for dementia, is reduced.
A critical factor may be the way hearing aids are used. A user must practice to maximize their effectiveness and they may need reprogramming by an audiologist. Additional assistive technologies like looping and FM systems may also be required. And people with progressive hearing loss may need new aids every few years.
Increasingly, people buy hearing aids online or from big-box stores like Costco, making it hard for the user to follow up. In the first year I had hearing aids, I saw my audiologist initially every two weeks for reprocessing and then every three months.
In one study, Dr. Lin and his colleague Wade Chien found that only one in seven adults who could benefit from hearing aids used them. One deterrent is cost ($2,000 to $6,000 per ear), seldom covered by insurance. Another is the stigma of old age.
Hearing loss is a natural part of aging. But for most people with hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the condition begins long before they get old. Almost two-thirds of men with hearing loss began to lose their hearing before age 44. My hearing loss began when I was 30.
Forty-eight million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss. If it can be proved in a clinical trial that hearing aids help delay or offset dementia, the benefits would be immeasurable.
“Could we do something to reduce cognitive decline and delay the onset of dementia?” he asked. “It’s hugely important, because by 2050, 1 in 30 Americans will have dementia.
“If we could delay the onset by even one year, the prevalence of dementia drops by 15 percent down the road. You’re talking about billions of dollars in health care savings.”
Should studies establish definitively that correcting hearing loss decreases the potential for early-onset dementia, we might finally overcome the stigma of hearing loss. Get your hearing tested, get it corrected, and enjoy a longer cognitively active life. Establishing the dangers of uncorrected hearing might even convince private insurers and Medicare that covering the cost of hearing aids is a small price to pay to offset the cost of dementia.
Katherine Bouton is the author of the new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You,” from which this essay is adapted.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 12, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Medical College of Wisconsin. It is in Milwaukee, not Madison.
Copyright © Itchy News. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
