Healthy diet may reduce risk of hearing loss in women

New York, May 12: Here is good news for women who are suffering from hearing loss. A new study has found that consuming healthy food may decrease the risk of hearing loss in women.

The findings, published in the Journal of Nutrition, suggests that healthy eating patterns may lower the risk of hearing loss by 30 per cent.

"Eating well contributes to overall good health, and it may also be helpful in reducing the risk of hearing loss," said one of the study author Sharon Curhan from the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, US.

For the study, researchers examined the relation between three different diets and risk of developing hearing loss -- The Alternate Mediterranean diet (AMED), Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), and the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 (AHEI-2010) -- in 70,966 women who were followed for 22 years.

The AMED diet includes extra virgin olive oil, grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish and moderate intake of alcohol.

The DASH diet is high in fruits and vegetables and low-fat dairy, and low in sodium. The AHEI-2010 diet has common components with AMED and DASH.

The researchers collected detailed information on dietary intake every four years.

They found that women whose diets most closely resembled the AMED or DASH dietary patterns had an approximately 30 per cent lower risk of moderate or worse hearing loss, compared with women whose diets resembled these dietary patterns the least.

"Interestingly, we observed that those following an overall healthy diet had a lower risk of moderate or worse hearing loss," Curhan said.

In a separate study of over 33,000 women for whom detailed hearing-related information had been collected suggested that the magnitude of the reduced risk may be even greater than 30 per cent, and may also pertain to the AHEI-2010, the researchers noted.