As I reluctantly age, many of my friends – and my husband among them – are beginning to show signs of progressive age-related hearing loss. My knowledge base has never been as useful as it has been lately over dinners, cocktails and hiking trips wherein I am asked about the “what do I do next?” Since I have spent my professional career either fitting or researching hearing aid technologies, these conversations are actually fun for me. My thoughts wander, however, during the usually lighthearted inquiries. Many of us are aware that the prevalence of hearing loss increases with age. Generally, we consider that about 10% of the population have significant hearing loss. An estimated 30 to 48 million Americans have enough hearing loss to significantly diminish their quality of life – academically, professionally, medically and socially.

To be further discouraging, It has been shown that untreated hearing loss has been shown to increase the risk of dementia. And we now have evidence that untreated hearing loss can have physical consequences as well, including excessive fatigue, stress and headaches, in addition to more reported problems with eating, sleeping and sex. In fact, a recent study found that moderate to severe hearing loss was associated with a 54% increased risk of death and a mild hearing loss was associated with a 54% increased risk of death compared to individuals with normal hearing.

Yikes! What to do?

One might think that my concern might be in the realm of how to fit any of these individuals with a hearing aid  to halt some of this measurable decline. Instead, what I usually end up talking about is hearing conservation, or what could have been the scenario if the same people asking for help had practiced a little caution in their lifestyles.

I don’t like loud sounds. I don’t mean loud fireworks or loud rock bands, I mean loud conversations, loud car radios, and even loud children playing. I did not wander through life wearing earplugs in those everyday situations – although I have a couple of friends who do – but I did avoid loudness more often than most people would.
Even when it was cool to do so, I did not listen to music with my SONY Walkman set of earphones, I rarely attended (or attend) a movie-theater movie where I have no personal volume control, and I certainly never took up motorcycling or race car driving as a sport! Why? I don’t like loud, and in many of those situations I did not have control over the volume. As I matured, I used more and more ear protection plugs and/or devices, even during one of Mead Killion’s small room lectures (since he did not have a volume control either). The long term effect of this silly behavior? I have 0 dB HL thresholds across the board…and I am slightly over 40.  I am quite sure that many of my friends and family would be willing to try it my way now, but there is no recovery from a lifetime of intermittent loud living!

Not everyone overexposes their ears to loud music, but many other environmental sounds have a habit of showing up and will have the same negative effect: woodworking, lawn mowing, driving with that car window open for 45 years! Outside my office I see the jack-hammerer with his earplugs barely propped in his ears and I want to rush to his rescue…but he doesn’t want my help, at least not now. I will see him in my clinic in 20 years.

So, this post is not about the newest and highest level of technology, although I have enjoyed chasing after that for most of my professional life, but rather a lament that I even have to fit hearing aids at all! Much of the age-related hearing loss that we call presbycusis can be traced back to many, many episodes of loud sound exposure. I call it sound pollution and am on a mission to end it (in my world).