![]() ![]() ![]() It was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme and involved researchers based across the world, including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Cyprus, France, Greece and Ireland.Īs reported in NIHR Evidence, Professor Piers Dawes, co-lead for Manchester BRC’s Hearing Health project investigating the prevalence of hearing loss in people with dementia, said: “To maximise quality of life and ensure people get access to appropriate help, it is vital that cognitive difficulties are reliably differentiated from hearing difficulties. The study was led by Piers Dawes, Professor of Audiology at the University of Queensland in Australia and The University of Manchester, supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). The standard test is already available in more than 100 languages. The test is also being translated and validated in Arabic, Greek, German and Portuguese, and other languages will follow. Researchers say this meets an international need for a reliable test to identify cognitive impairment among people with hearing loss. This is the first fully validated and reliable cognitive test for people with hearing problems and is now available for use. It was found to be accurate and reliable in people with and without hearing loss. The team evaluated the revised test in a study of 256 people. One question assessed attention and the other 2 questions assessed language. In this study, the research team instead replaced 3 spoken questions from the MoCA test with written ones. However, this approach made the test less accurate. Previously, other researchers have tried removing spoken questions from this test to accommodate hearing loss. It is an adapted version of a standard test – the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) – which is commonly used to diagnose dementia and mild cognitive impairment (a condition in which a person has minor problems with their mental abilities, such as memory or thinking). ![]() The new test developed and validated in the SENSE-Cog study could accurately diagnose dementia in people with hearing problems. People with hearing loss score worse in these tests, which could lead to a false diagnosis of dementia. However, tests for dementia which assess memory, attention and language often include spoken questions that rely on hearing. This means hearing loss commonly occurs alongside dementia. One in 11 people over the age of 65 have dementia in the UK, and more than 75% of people over 75 have hearing problems. Researchers have developed the first reliable test for dementia in people with hearing loss, following an international study led by The University of Manchester scientists. ![]()
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