Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will commission research on the potential impact of unaddressed hearing loss on dementia.
Since 2018, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has allocated around £2 million to research the links between unaddressed hearing loss and dementia. This includes the DIADEM project, which is being supported by the NIHR invention for innovation funding programme (i4i) and will evaluate new hearing tests that measure early brain changes in dementia. More information is available at the following link:
Through NIHR-funded Biomedical Research Centres, the NIHR is also supporting medical research into hearing loss and dementia.