Untreated Hearing Loss May Raise Risk of Other Health Issues  

The report also shows that those with untreated hearing loss experienced 46 percent higher total health care costs ($22,434) and almost 50 percent more hospital stays, and had a 44 percent higher risk of being readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, compared to those without hearing loss over a 10-year period.

Yeh says, “It’s the first study of its kind that has come out to show the association of uncorrected hearing loss with higher health care costs, more hospitalization, longer hospital stays and more readmission.”

“Those numbers are a big deal,” says Nicholas Reed, assistant professor of audiology at Johns Hopkins University and the lead author of the part of the report on hospitalizations. He surmises that, in addition to the previously noted health risks, the higher readmission rate and longer hospital stays “are very, very closely related to patient-provider communication issues.” A communication gap can lead to the patient having trouble following the treatment plan, for instance. “We don’t have the evidence that hearing aids would correct this” but “I think in our gut,” it makes sense that it would help.

One roadblock to correcting hearing loss is that Medicare does not cover hearing aids, which are expensive to pay for out-of-pocket: A pair of provider-prescribed hearing aids can cost more than $4,000. Yeh says the lack of Medicare coverage comes from the longtime, widely held assumption that hearing loss is a natural and unavoidable result of growing old “and you couldn’t do anything about it.” That’s not the case these days, she notes, with the advancements in testing and treatment. 

Reed agrees. “We used to treat hearing like it was sort of this benign thing, like, ‘Everybody gets hearing loss when they get older, no big deal,’” he says. “But I think this [research] is just more evidence that hearing is way more important than we ever thought it was.”