Is diabetes linked to hearing loss?

NEW YORK, Dec 2, (RTRS): Diabetes has already been tied to an increased risk of kidney and cardiovascular troubles, nerve damage and vision loss, and now a new study finds diabetics to be more than twice as likely as those without the disease to have hearing impairment.

In a review of past research on the question, scientists in Japan also found that younger diabetics were at even higher risk than older adults - though they cannot explain why, and experts caution that this kind of study does not prove that diabetes is directly responsible for the greater hearing loss rates.

“It doesn’t definitively answer the question, but it continues to raise an important point that patients might ask about,” said Dr. Steven Smith, diabetes specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

It’s also not the first time researchers have found a link between diabetes and hearing loss.

In 2008, researchers from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw similar patterns in a sample of more than 11,000 people. In that study, people with diabetes were twice as likely to have hearing loss as those without the condition.

Generally, hearing loss is defined as having trouble understanding what people are saying in a hushed voice, and missing some words at a regular volume.

The American Diabetes Association estimates there are currently about 16 million people living in the US with diabetes, and NIH says about 36 million Americans report some level of

The new manual adds the term “autism spectrum disorder,” which already is used by many experts in the field. Asperger’s disorder will be dropped and incorporated under that umbrella diagnosis. The new category will include kids with severe autism, who often don’t talk or interact, as well as those with milder forms.

Kelli Gibson of Battle Creek, Michigan, who has four sons with various forms of autism, said Saturday she welcomes the change. Her boys all had different labels in the old diagnostic manual, including a 14-year-old with bugs.

Tracing the source of an infection would then become simpler and health workers could concentrate their resources on controlling its spread.

“What we’ve done is demonstrated that the technology is able to answer questions hearing loss.

It’s thought that high blood sugar levels brought on by diabetes may lead to hearing loss by damaging blood vessels in the ears, according to Chika Horikawa, the study’s lead author from Niigata University Faculty of Medicine in Japan, and colleagues.

They collected information from 13 previous studies examining the link between diabetes and hearing loss and published between 1977 and 2011. Together, the data covered 7,377 diabetics and 12,817 people without the condition.

Overall, Horikawa’s team found that diabetics were 2.15 times as likely as people without the disease to have hearing loss. But when the results were broken down by age, people under age 60 had 2.61 times the risk while people over 60 had 1.58 times higher risk.

The researchers, whose findings appear in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, note that future studies that take more factors into account, such as age and noisy environments, are needed to clarify the link between diabetes and hearing loss.

Still, Horikawa told Reuters Health in an email, people should recognize that diabetics may be at risk for hearing loss based on their results.

“Furthermore, these results propose that diabetic patients are screened for hearing impairment from (an) earlier age compared with nondiabetics,” said Horikawa, adding that hearing loss has also been linked to an increased risk of depression and dementia. Asperger’s. “To give it separate names never made sense to me,” Gibson said. “To me, my children all had autism.”

Disabled

Three of her boys receive special education services in public school; the fourth is enrolled in a school for disabled children. The new autism diagnosis won’t affect those services, Gibson said. She also has a 3-year-old daughter without autism.

People with dyslexia also were closely watching for the new updated doctors’ guide. that could not previously be asked,” Walker told AFP after his research was published in the US journal Science.

“That has potential to answer specific questions in the hospital setting that will help in controlling... hospital acquired infections.”

Until now, he said, it had been impossible to know whether closely-related bacteria causing infections were transferred from patient to patient, or were being passed on by poor clinical practice, a carrier, a contaminated instrument or something else. (AFP) Let HIV carriers drive taxis: A petition against a rule banning people with HIV/AIDS from driving taxis in the Spanish capital has gathered 80,000 signatures ahead of World Aids Day on Saturday, activists said.

“This rule is an act of discrimination against those people, which is unacceptable in a modern and open society like Madrid’s,” the HIV/AIDS organisation Cesida said in the online petition.

It said it handed over the petition on Friday to the town hall, author of the regulation that bans people with “infectious or contagious” diseases from getting a taxi licence.

“HIV is a virus that is not contagious and is transmitted not casually but by very specific practices,” but despite this it is on the list of diseases that rule a person out of getting a Madrid taxi licence, Cesida said.

Meanwhile as Spanish civil groups marked World Aids Day, they warned that public spending cuts imposed during the country’s recession were threatening care for people with the illness. (AFP)