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Hearing loss increases dementia risk and affects millions of adults.

Hearing loss has many social implications, including frustration and isolation.

Treating hearing loss may help protect long-term brain health.

What would be your best estimate of the number of people in the United States with significant hearing loss? You may be as surprised as I was to learn the answer: about 73 million, or approximately 1 in 5 persons. Moreover, the incidence of this loss increases over the lifespan, nearly doubling with every decade. By age 60, more than two-thirds of people are afflicted with hearing loss. Even more troubling is the well-established link between hearing loss and cognitive decline, impaired communication, and dementia.

According to the Lancet Commission on Dementia (2020), hearing loss in middle age and beyond is the single biggest risk factor for dementia. In 2023, the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) published findings that people older than 65 with moderate to severe hearing loss are afflicted with 61 percent greater prevalence of dementia compared to a similar group with normal hearing.

Key to these associations between hearing and dementia is the concept of "degraded speech." Actually, the term degraded speech is a misnomer: The speech is clear enough to those with normal hearing, but the perception of the speech is degraded in those with hearing loss, usually by background noise or electronic transmission.

Picture yourself in a frantically busy trattoria with voices bouncing off the tiled walls, ceiling, and floor. While you may hear the lion’s share of what your companion is saying, certain words may remain ambiguous. Did he say “safe lane” or “save lane”—you just couldn’t quite catch the f v distinction. In such a situation, the topic of conversation often provides the correct word choice. Was the conversation about traffic (safe) or finance (save)?

Such distinctions are perceived in the primary auditory cortex, located within the temporal lobe, which is........

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