by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
A man wrote:
My mother, who is coming to terms with her hearing loss, was told recently by a hearing aid dispenser that her hearing loss would probably continue to get worse with age—losing something like up to 7-8% of her hearing each year. However if she were to get hearing aids—that wearing them regularly would actually slow the progression of her loss to around 1% a year due to the stimulation of the inner ear and other factors. Is there any truth to this claim? Do aids really help to slow down the hearing loss?
I think the salesman was using scare tactics. I’ve never seen those figures mentioned before and I watch out for information like that.
There is some truth to it though. IF your brain doesn’t hear anything, then yes, the auditory pathways “deteriorate” over time. Just as exercise keeps our bodies healthy, so to does hearing things keep our auditory circuits functioning optimally.
However, when we lose some of our hearing, there is typically still enough left that keeps the auditory system working. It’s not as though we live in total silence—we just don’t hear as much as we did before.
Therefore, I think those figures are grossly high. For example, at 8% descending balance, in 10 years according to him, you would only hear 43% as much as you did 10 years previously—and I just don’t buy that.
For example, if that were true, then my right ear—in which I didn’t wear a hearing aid for over 30 years, even thought it had a severe loss, shouldn’t hear anything by now—yet it now hears better than my left ear which is the ear in which I wore a hearing aid! Both ears had the same hearing loss to start with.
Apart from all this, it is well-known that the average person loses more and more (mostly high-frequency) hearing with increasing age. (The salesman was right there.) This has nothing to do with wearing hearing aids or not. Its just a fact of our modern life. So hearing will continue to deteriorate with increasing age, and hearing aids don’t stop it or slow it down significantly from anything I have read.
One report showed that the average person at 4000 Hz has the following degree of hearing loss by decade:
10s 0 db
20s 15 dB
30s 20 dB
40s 30 dB
50s 40 dB
60s 45 dB
70s 60 dB
80s 60 dB
90s 80 dB
As you can see, age is the big factor in how well we hear, not whether we wear hearing aids or not.
What hearing aids do is let us hear better in spite of our increasing hearing losses with aging. So it is to your mom’s advantage to wear hearing aids so she can communicate more easily in spite of losing more hearing each year due to aging, not to try to preserve her existing hearing.
Incidentally, when considering hearing aids, my policy is to get strong enough ones so that you only run them at about half power. That way, as your hearing gets worse, you have plenty of reserve power to compensate for it—otherwise you’ll have to buy new hearing aids every couple of years—and that gets expensive.