[gwnywg]

Some time ago I was offered to start using hearing aid, and I must say when I tried it I felt like something opened in my brain. So now I read this article where it says wearing hearing aid might rise the risk of ending up with dementia... and I'm confused, I thought hearing aid activates brain regions not used previously. I thought it's reasonable to assume wearing hearing aid is good for your brain, it's making me sad it might be the opposite...

[veqq]

Do not worry. The article saying it might be the opposite was incorrect. You can ignore it.

[T-A]

From the article, describing the now-retracted paper:

“In people with hearing loss,” the authors wrote, “hearing aid use is associated with a risk of dementia of a similar level to that of people without hearing loss.” They proposed “up to 8% of dementia cases could be prevented with proper hearing loss management.

From the article, describing the replication work which led to its retraction:

Mur and his colleagues intended to build on the article with a related analysis on the same UK Biobank data. But when he couldn’t replicate the main findings, Mur scrutinized the paper more deeply. [...] Most notably, he found that hearing aid use did not correspond to a lower rate of dementia for people with hearing loss, as the authors reported. He found the opposite: among people with hearing loss, the dementia rate was higher for those using hearing aids.

[krackers]

Isn't there an obvious confounding variable here where probably the hearing-aid using population has bad hearing, and if their hearing aid was not updated then it's more likely they would develop dementia? So the results from the paper could technically be true for the subset of hearing aid users that don't go for checkups.

[gwnywg]

People who publish papers labeled as science studies need to take more care and responsibility as this can lead to life-changing decisions by public...

[gus_massa]

This is a common misunderstanding of how science works.

For life changing decitions people should wait until the study has been replicated a few times, and preferabely destiled to a general advice by the FDA or whoever is in charge.

Isolated papers are better than blogpost in allcaps, but they are not "setled" science.

The problem is that the press release of the universities and the report by science "journalism" present these single paper result as a definitive result.