Loneliness has been long recognized as an adverse outcome of hearing loss, but whether it contributes to hearing loss as a risk factor has remained unclear. In this cohort study using data from 490,865 UK Biobank participants, researchers found that individuals who reported feeling lonely at baseline were significantly more likely to develop hearing loss over a median 12.3-year follow-up period. The study, published in Health Data Science, controlled for a broad range of demographic, lifestyle, clinical, and genetic factors, yet loneliness remained an independent predictor of incident hearing loss.

The association was most pronounced for sensorineural hearing loss and stronger in women than in men. The findings highlight a possible bidirectional relationship between loneliness and hearing loss, suggesting a reinforcing cycle. The authors propose that loneliness may affect auditory health through mechanisms such as inflammation, stress-related neuroendocrine changes, and unhealthy behavior patterns. The research team aims to explore these pathways in future studies and evaluate whether interventions that reduce loneliness can mitigate hearing loss risk.

In a new study published in Nature, researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center explore a surprising phenomenon in which high doses of radiation cause growth in existing metastatic tumors that weren’t directly treated with radiation.

MIT researchers found that vision-language models, widely used to analyze medical images, do not understand negation words like “no” and “not.” This could cause them to fail unexpectedly when asked to retrieve medical images that contain certain objects but not others.