After leaving my audiologist’s office one morning last June sporting new high-tech hearing aids, I quickly discovered what I’d been missing.
Suddenly my phone’s ringtone seemed much too loud—as my two grown daughters had often complained. The chirping of birds outside my window pierced my ears. I realized that our 50-year-old house creaked and groaned frequently. And, to my chagrin, I now knew that my favorite pair of athletic shorts made a loud swishing sound every time I took a step.
But most importantly, I no longer struggled to decipher words that I missed while talking in person or on the phone.
As I approached my 60th birthday in May, I decided to get my ears checked. A visit to an audiologist when I was in my 40s revealed that I had a low-level loss of hearing at certain frequencies in my left ear—possibly due to repeated ear infections as a child. I wondered if my hearing loss had gotten worse.
Then I read about a recent study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers who found that hearing intervention slowed down loss of thinking and memory abilities by 48% over three years in older adults at increased risk for cognitive decline and dementia. The goal of the ACHIEVE study, which involved 977 people ages 70 to 84 with untreated hearing loss, was to determine if treating that condition in older adults reduces the loss of thinking and memory abilities that can occur with aging.
Though I was much younger than the study’s targeted age group, the news hit home. My father, who died in 2019, suffered from dementia in his later years, and my mother, who has a hearing aid, has Alzheimer’s disease. With that family history, I am determined to take whatever steps I can to avoid a similar fate. Hearing loss is one of the 12 modifiable risk factors for dementia, which include smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and depression, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International.
“Forty percent of all dementia is associated with modifiable risk factors, and hearing loss is actually the most significant modifiable risk factor,” says my audiologist, Candice Ortiz-Hawkins of the Capital Institute of Hearing & Balance in Silver Spring.
My hearing evaluation showed mild to moderate loss, with my left ear being worse. It’s difficult to determine what caused this loss—it could be genetic, the result of those early ear infections, noise exposure or other factors, Ortiz-Hawkins says.
Although my family history spurred my decision to get my hearing tested, it turns out that many of us should be concerned about our hearing. Noise exposure is a top culprit when it comes to hearing loss, experts say, and our increasingly loud daily environments and use of portable audio devices may be putting people as young as their 20s at risk.
Most people don’t know how easily they can damage their hearing—for example, by cranking up the volume on wireless earbuds to block out noise at the gym or on the Metro, says audiologist Tricia Terlep of Potomac Audiology, which has offices in Rockville and Frederick.
“You’re not really able to gauge how loud you’re turning it up. You’re just like, Oh, now I can hear it,” Terlep says. “And so you don’t have any idea that it’s dangerous and you don’t have any gauge for the fact that as you go up, you are cutting that safe exposure time in half, even with very small increases in volume.”
Even when people do perceive a change in their hearing, research shows they wait nine years on average to seek help. “Less than 30% of Americans who are 70 years or older with hearing loss actually wear hearing aids, and 16% of people that are in [the] age range from 20 to 69 that actually have hearing loss wear hearing aids,” Ortiz-Hawkins says.
The good news is that those who need hearing aids now can choose from a wide variety of options and prices that take advantage of today’s technology. My hearing aids are shaped like slim quarter-moons, match my dark brown hair and connect to Bluetooth in my phone.
“When you think about hearing aids, you think about the big honkers that grandparents used to wear,” Ortiz-Hawkins says. “Every time hearing aids come out, the new thing is they’re smaller, they’re sleeker, they’re less obvious.”
Blaine Hoffman, 26, sports black hearing aids that resemble earbuds. Hoffman had long suspected his hearing wasn’t perfect. He decided to get tested after thinking he wasn’t hearing as well after an ear infection in 2023.
“I was very shocked at just the size of them and, like, how seamlessly they just kind of slot into my ears and how easy it is to … just forget that I’m wearing them,” says Hoffman, who got the hearing aids in August after being tested by Ortiz-Hawkins.
In October 2022, the Food and Drug Administration helped increase access by creating a new category of hearing aids that can be purchased over the counter starting around $500 per pair for adults 18 and older with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss—though audiologists caution that such devices aren’t likely to provide the same benefits as personalized hearing aids that require a prescription, which can cost thousands of dollars.
As awareness grows about the need to be mindful of hearing loss, experts say reducing the stigma associated with wearing hearing aids can help people who have been reluctant to seek treatment.
Hoffman was hesitant about getting hearing aids because he didn’t see photos of young people in marketing materials for hearing aid brands. Then he joined an online community for hearing aid users. “It seems like it’s a little bit more common that younger people are starting to seek out hearing aids,” he says. “That’s helped out a lot.” He no longer struggles to hear colleagues at work. And eating out isn’t as challenging as it had been.
“Now that I can actually hear and engage in conversations in restaurants, it’s, like, game-changing,” Hoffman says. “Now I don’t have to zone out at the table.”
This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.