If You Can’t Hear Your Friends You’re Missing More Than Gossip.

By Erica and Karen

We are beneficiaries of the third demographic dividend. We will live longer and healthier than those who went before us. Most exciting. But our bodies may not have fully caught up. We need to plan for the fact that evolution has not yet made every part of our bodies resilient for 100 years.

Living those extra three decades without being able to hear would be unintelligent.

Like most women in our cohort, we know people who have lost some of their hearing. We used to think that not being able to hear perfectly was no big deal—until you couldn’t hear anything—so we just accommodated it by speaking louder and louder. We seldom encountered a doctor—including our own—who conducted a hearing test as part of an annual physical, so how serious could hearing loss be? And who wants to wear hearing aids? They signal that you are old and infirm and non-functional. Best to just cope.

Well, we recently had a conversation with friends who have seen close up what happens when you ignore hearing loss. These friends have parents who refused to recognize hearing loss. As time went by, their parents received less and less information from other people, and withdrew from social contact, embarrassed about being unable to respond properly to what was being said. As their ability to engage with others diminished, they withdrew further and further, until they were living in their own (very little) worlds. The ultimate effect of hearing loss on cognitive function was plain.

That was eye—er, ear—opening. We decided to do a. little research. The research confirmed what our friends were saying. Listen to Dr. Frank Lin, a hearing expert at Johns Hopkins:

“Brain scans show us that hearing loss may contribute to a faster rate of atrophy in the brain,” Lin says. “Hearing loss also contributes to social isolation. You may not want to be with people as much, and when you are you may not engage in conversation as much. These factors may contribute to dementia.”

While there is no causal relationship between hearing loss and dementia, one can see the connection. And hearing loss begins earlier than when you might expect, so you need to plan. Part of the plan is to get over the idea that correcting your hearing makes you seem older than not correcting your hearing. Very few people actually use hearing aids. That suggests that hearing aids need to be improved. Maybe they are getting better—both devices and cochlear implants—but maybe not better enough. And the marketing. Take a page from Caddis. OK, maybe it’s harder with hearing aids—but we’re sure it can be done.

Another thing that surely can be done is to improve hearing tests. Apparently, hearing tests are insufficiently complex—which seems odd in an age when we can do anything with technology.

Most clinicians who manage patients with hearing loss will admit that conventional hearing tests are imperfect, despite the important information they provide. The imperfections in conventional hearing tests are due to the fact that it is a simple measure that is trying to quantify a complex process. For example, hearing tests present simple tones and words, but hearing in real-life situations involves sentences, speech, and language, which is much more complicated to hear and would require more complicated testing to evaluate.

We’re not any kind of hearing experts. But we are becoming convinced that, to make the best of the extra thirty years of life that advances in pubic health have given us, we need to be on our game for those thirty years. That means we need to hear. And we can’t allow the people we care about to recede into silence and isolation.

Life is complicated, but if hearing loss can affect life is such serious ways then let’s do what we always do when we see a problem looming. Confront it and solve it.