Can Hearing Aids Help You Live Longer?

There have been some intriguing, but slightly concerning, studies over the years about how untreated hearing loss is linked to different health conditions. Your ears do a lot more for you than just hear!

Untreated hearing loss has been shown to affect your balance, your memory, your mental health, and even your chances of dementia. It’s exceedingly easy to treat your hearing loss challenges with the help of professional hearing care—so don’t panic just yet.

However, hearing care can often be left forgotten as we make our annual appointments to get our teeth cleaned, our eyesight tested, and our physical health checked. Most people don’t realize that their hearing needs a boost until it starts to affect their day-to-day life.

Recently, I found a newer study with a more hopeful conclusion: with hearing aids, you can live longer.

How Do Hearing Aids Increase My Life Expectancy?

This study, taken on by Dr. Janet Choi from the University of Southern California, studied how regular use of hearing aids affected almost 10,000 participants that had hearing loss challenges. Her findings were incredible: the patients that used their hearing aids regularly had a 24 percent lower risk of premature mortality compared to the group that didn’t use hearing aids at all.

Of course, Dr. Choi’s study emphasizes that it’s not just the hearing aids alone that helped those participants live a longer life, but that those people who wore them regularly saw the most benefits from their use.

Hearing loss isn’t a visible issue—it happens gradually over time, and many people who should wear their hearing aids daily neglect to do so for a myriad of reasons. Fear of looking old, uncomfortable new technology, a learning curve to remembering how to hear clearly…

Regular hearing aid wear and professional hearing care are investments into not just your hearing, but your overall health. It’s important to note that while hearing aids can provide some serious improvements to your well-being, you need to wear them in order to see those benefits for yourself.

Dr. Choi is a hearing aid wearer herself, and she was astonished to see that just 12 percent of her participants wore their hearing aids regularly outside of the study. Hearing aids helped change her hearing health for the better, and she’s hoping that this study will encourage more people to invest in their hearing health, as well.

If you read this far, perhaps you’re one of those people!​

Concerned About Your Hearing?

Advanced hearing aid technology and professional hearing care have proven to help you stay steady on your feet, improve your social isolation, boost your memory, and now, even help you live longer.

If you’d like to see if hearing aids could be a good fit for you, our team is more than happy to help you.