4 Ways Hearing Aids Can Benefit Your Health

2. Hearing aids can lower your risk of falling

Falls are serious business: One in four adults age 65 and older report falling each year, according to the CDC, and falls are the leading cause of both fatal and nonfatal injuries in people in that age range.

“Falls are the most common and costly hearing-associated safety event in older adults,” says King.

She also says there’s a clear link between hearing loss and falls: The worse your hearing, the higher your risk for falling. And the research is clear too. Wearing hearing aids can help prevent falls. A study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that adults 60 and older with hearing loss in both ears are 2.4 times more likely to fall than those who wear hearing aids.

The protection was strongest among those who reported using hearing aids for at least four hours. A lot of research that preceded this study showed connections between an increased fall risk and fall rate for people with hearing loss, but those studies didn’t consider hearing aid use, says Laura Campos, a clinical audiologist and instructor of otolaryngology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who was the study’s lead author.

“It still was a really big research question of, OK, so we know there’s this link between hearing loss and falls,” Campos says, “but if we are aiding those individuals and we are bringing back that auditory information, can we potentially reduce that fall risk back more into the expected range?” 

 The study surveyed about 300 people and considered factors like their age, gender, cognitive decline and medications that can cause dizziness. The research found that those who wore hearing aids lowered their risk of falling by about 50 percent.

Campos has three hypotheses on why wearing hearing aids may prevent falls. First, if you have hearing loss, you might also have vestibular loss in the part of the inner ear that affects balance. Second, wearing hearing aids may help lighten the amount of brain power you need in a given moment to communicate, so you may be better able to maintain your balance.

Third, your ability to spatially orient yourself relies on your hearing, just as bats use echolocation to fly. “The idea is that hearing aids give back access to auditory cues so we can orient ourselves in space,” Campos says. 

3. Hearing aids could prevent or delay dementia

A University of Southern Denmark study published in 2024 found a link between hearing loss and the onset of dementia. The large study reviewed the hearing results of more than 573,000 people in the Hearing Examinations in Southern Denmark database, and the results suggest that people with hearing loss have as much as a 13 percent higher risk of developing dementia than people with normal hearing.

The study also found that the risk of getting dementia was 20 percent higher for people who did not wear hearing aids, compared with people with normal hearing, suggesting that wearing hearing aids can delay or even stop the onset of dementia. 

The study, which was the largest of its kind, builds on previous research that has also determined that wearing hearing aids can help slow down dementia. 

One such study was the landmark Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders, or ACHIEVE, study led by Frank Lin, M.D., of Johns Hopkins University. The study involved nearly 1,000 adults ages 70 to 84 with untreated hearing loss.

They were randomly assigned to two groups: One group received hearing aids and was taught how to use them. The second group — the control — was enrolled in a health education program. Participants were followed for three years.

When both groups were analyzed, decline in thinking and memory abilities were no different for those who got hearing aids and those who didn’t. But researchers did determine that those most at risk for dementia who received hearing intervention slowed the loss of hearing and thinking abilities by nearly half over three years. These participants were older and had cardiovascular problems.

Researchers said they think the improvement showed only in those with heart issues because their risk for cognitive decline was three times faster than that of those who were healthy. 

A separate Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study published in 2023 in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at more than 2,400 older adults, half of them over 80, and found that the prevalence of dementia was 61 percent higher among those with moderate or severe hearing loss than among those with normal hearing. And wearing hearing aids was linked to a 32 percent lower prevalence of dementia in those who had moderate or severe hearing loss. 

“Hearing is complicated,” the Mayo Clinic’s Shah says. “If there is no input coming into your ears, there are theories that, like a muscle you don’t use, the brain will either atrophy [shrink] or stop listening.”

He adds, “People who have hearing impairment actually do have brain atrophy,” and there is a link between smaller total brain volume and hearing loss. 

4. Hearing aids can help ease depression, social isolation and anxiety

“When you think about what hearing loss can lead to, one of the most obvious things is the impact on mood, isolation and depression,” says Ronan Factora, M.D., a geriatrician at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Geriatric Medicine.

“If you’re not able to hear conversations around you, you have a tendency to withdraw from those activities.… Hearing aids can help to potentially reverse that isolation and loneliness,” Factora says.

Research supports the link. An analysis of 20 studies involving 675,000 people found that those who have hearing loss are also more likely to have depression and anxiety than those with normal hearing. 

Another study, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, used data from more than 17,000 participants in the European Health Interview Survey. They all had hearing loss and answered questions about their mental health. The study, which also considered factors like age, education and other health risks, found that wearing hearing aids reduced participants’ risk of moderate to severe depression by about 40 percent. The largest reduction was seen in women.

“We do see a protective effect on social isolation and loneliness measures, meaning that over three years we see that those who got hearing aids experienced less social network shrinkage and were less likely to report loneliness. And that’s pretty powerful stuff,” says Nicholas Reed, an audiologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Shah calls this a bidirectional relationship. 

“If you are depressed, you are more likely to have hearing loss, and if you have hearing loss, you are more likely to be depressed,” Shah says. “So if one of my patients is depressed or anxious, I should really assess their hearing because it might be a way to get them out of their depression or anxiety, regardless of the cause.”

For those over 65, it is part of the Mayo Clinic’s standard of care to ask about hearing loss as part of the patient’s annual wellness visit for Medicare, Shah says.

He adds that the positives of treating hearing loss are very important. “You can thrive, stay engaged in the world, in your work, in your volunteering, in your family.” ​

Editor’s note: This story, originally published on Feb. 7, 2024, has been updated to include new information.