Absolutely. Quite a lot of research is going on with trying to understand the relationship between hearing loss and dementia. We know that there are some published, peer-reviewed, well-designed studies that have linked cognitive decline to dementia, but there's much more work that needs to be done to truly understand the relationship between hearing loss, cognitive decline and dementia.
There's a lot of work going on in Canada and other major centres in the world to try to understand the function of the brain and what is happening in those relationships.
There are several theories. One is that with cognitive decline and hearing loss, you have an overload of the brain attempting to compensate for the signals that aren't coming in. There are theories that relate to functions in the brain slowly declining and dying off because they're not being exercised, just like exercising the body.
Those are the kinds of areas they're looking at. They're looking at relationships with causality for hearing loss and causality for dementia and how they link together. It is definitely on our radar and it's one of the top areas of research.