Hearing loss is expected to double among US adults
The number of American adults living with some form of hearing loss is expected to nearly double by 2060, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins researchers.
Already, about two-thirds of Americans 70 years or older suffer from hearing loss, and increasingly aging sections of the population will accelerate the need for services and treatments to help lessen the impact of hearing loss on daily life.
The study was published Thursday in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.
Lead author Adele Gorman and colleagues at Johns Hopkins took hearing test information from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a large and long-running set of surveys done by the National Center for Health Statistics to assess the health of Americans.
They then developed forecasts of the number of people expected to suffer hearing loss in the coming decades, based on estimates of population growth and shifts in the average age in the U.S.
They found that the number of adults 20 years or older with some kind of measurable hearing loss will climb from 44 million people in 2020 (about 15 percent of all adults) to more than 73 million people in 2060. Their total share of the U.S. population, which is expected to grow overall, will slightly increase to about 22 percent.