Lori Walsh: Many of us have been tuning in to the governor's press conferences along with press conferences from the white house coronavirus task force. Most of us have heard so many pandemic new stories, we make special efforts to unplug from the noise.
A worthwhile question is, have we all been hearing the news? And the answer to that is no, not fully. Lindsey Jorgensen is an audiologist and an associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Dakota. And she joins us now on the phone. Lindsey, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Lindsey Jorgensen: Thank you so much for having me.
Lori Walsh: One of the things that we noticed very early with the governor's press conference and the mayor's press conferences was a sign language interpreter was often placed nearby. It's a public official who was talking.
And I think a lot of people made an assumption that that was a really good thing. And I think it is. But if you don't have hearing loss or you don't know many deaf people, that assumption is that everybody's being served and is therefore hearing the message. Tell us why that's not necessarily the case.
Lindsey Jorgensen: So most people with hearing loss don't use American sign language or some kind of manual communication. So although those ASL interpreters are incredibly important for deaf individuals, it doesn't provide the access to the public service announcement for most people who have hearing loss.
Lori Walsh: All right. So tell us about most people who have hearing loss. What kind of spectrum are we talking about here?
Lindsey Jorgensen: So the current estimates are between about 28 and 32 million Americans have hearing loss that impacts their daily life one way or another. And so we kind of say, "If you live long enough, at some point you're likely to have hearing loss." And that's even more evident in South Dakota because in South Dakota, we have a very high rate of veteran population and veterans are at a higher risk of hearing loss due to their noise exposure during their service time.
Additionally, farmers and those things may have noise-induced hearing loss. And with most people, the challenge is that it's slow oncoming and so they don't realize that they have a hearing loss. And some of those estimates say that if you're 65 years of age or older, you're somewhere about 50 to 65% of people have some kind of impactful hearing loss. And if you're 80 years of age or older, between 80 and 95% of those people have hearing loss.
Lori Walsh: That's a lot of people. Also, we have a hunting culture and a lot of hunters hearing safety is very important and it's not always taken seriously. Or there are accidents with hearing protection and stuff that could cause immediate hearing loss. One of the things we learned as we walked into this pandemic was there were certain things we were prepared to handle and there were certain things we were woefully unprepared to handle.
And if you were thinking currently about seeing an audiologist and all of a sudden this happened, there's all kinds of things that could throw you off your game here. Let's talk a little bit about isolation and what kind of social isolation does hearing loss sort of cause.
Lindsey Jorgensen: So hearing loss in general does cause a social isolation even outside of this pandemic type social isolation that we're all experiencing. And so those kinds of things have been shown to have issues with depression and some cognitive decline. We also see that hearing loss can cause increases of medical errors because people don't take their medications or things that their physicians are prescribing.
And so the hearing loss in general can cause a multitude of problems. Well, now that many of us have stopped seeing many patients in close contact except for emergency situations. If you were thinking about seeing an audiologist to get hearing aids, that would definitely be hindered by this pandemic because we are not seeing, most audiologists are not seeing patients for routine hearing tests.
Now that being said, if you have a sudden hearing loss or if you have some kind of other issue, we are definitely still seeing patients. But on a day to day basis, we have definitely cut back on most hearing tests. When we do look at it, hearing aids can treat hearing loss, but only about 20% of people who have a significant hearing loss, even use hearing aids.
And so the data suggests, although people report that they may have hearing loss, only about 20% of those people actually do pursue hearing aids.
Lori Walsh: Okay. So I have a bias, I'm just going to reveal that I am really pro-hearing aid because I have people in my life whose lives have been changed because they have gone down this road and gotten effective hearing aids. And I'm not saying it was an easy, boom, I got the hearing aids and everything was better.
There was certainly an adjustment period and a learning curve and all the things that you're worried about, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do, but it's not necessarily hard either. So what keeps people from getting hearing aids and how often is it someone like me who is telling the other person you need to get your hearing checked?
Lindsey Jorgensen: It's definitely some interesting data. And the data suggests, although people report that they don't get hearing aids due to the cost. And we're not saying that hearing aids aren't expensive. And to be honest, most insurances do not cover hearing aids. There are ways to get hearing aids through programs like if you're working through vocational rehabilitation, people on Medicaid get hearing aids, those things. But Medicare and most insurances do not cover hearing aids or don't cover them fully.
They may give a portion of them, but the data that suggests that in areas and countries where the devices are free of charge due to universal healthcare, the percentages only go from about 20% of people getting hearing aids to somewhere in the 30% range. So we see an increase of about five to 10%. So for most people it's not actually the cost that's that's inhibiting it. So there's something else, whether that be the stigma of wearing a hearing aid, thinking that you're getting old.
I will caveat that and say that hearing aids are now much smaller and not as noticeable. There are a lot more people wearing hearing aids than you would think. So Sir Paul McCartney, if you guys watched the One World program the other day, he actually had his hearing aids setting on top of his piano during his performance. So there are a lot more people that are wearing hearing aids than you probably recognize.
Lori Walsh: Yeah, and they're really a lot easier. I mean they connect to your TV, they can connect to your phone. If you're in some theaters in the world, they connect to the stage so you can see a concert. Tell me a little bit about when you use a hearing aid, where you get an audiologist, when you have the kind of support that you need, how does your life change? Help people understand what's on the other side of really going and getting help.
Lindsey Jorgensen: So hearing aids are not just giving someone 20/20 hearing anymore and unfortunately that's not the way most hearing aids work. So when you have hearing loss, there's damage to the inside or the organ of hearing. And so although we can give you an aid, it's not going to fix the problem. But that being said, if you can hear something in you're aware of that sound, you're much more likely to make sense of it.
So we do see a lot of changes in people when they get hearing aids. It does take, like you said, a little bit of work to get there, but we see the use of hearing aids have been shown decreases in social isolation. Well, right now when we're all being forced to stay home watching those public service announcements and seeing what's going on in the world keeps us connected with our world.
But also a lot of us are using telephones and video conferencing to stay connected with our families. My family lives in Idaho or my parents live in Idaho. My brother lives in Atlanta and my in-laws live in Oregon. There's only one way for me to be able to communicate with them and that's through a video service or the telephone. And I love that that people can do that and hearing aids allow you to do that.
Modern hearing aids connect to telephones as well as a rechargeable. So that's a really nice option as well. And so getting you connected with your family and friends is also important, which is why we do see a decrease in depression when people start wearing hearing aids. We also do see a decrease in that cognitive decline. Our research at the University of South Dakota on cognitive decline in hearing aids does suggest that there is an association between the use of hearing aids and having some of those dementia-like symptoms.
Unfortunately, majority of the symptoms of hearing loss are also the same symptoms of dementia. And so as you age, your family may think that you're starting to get dementia when really you just may have untreated hearing loss, so repeating questions, not following conversations. Those symptoms of dementia are also symptoms of hearing loss. We're not saying that treating hearing loss is going to cure dementia. That's not what we're saying, but what we are saying is that it could decrease how rapidly someone declines if they're able to participate in their day to day life.
Additionally, like I said, we see a decrease in medical errors, but also we see a decrease in falls, which is interesting when you're thinking about the fall is the leading cause of fatal injury and the most common cause of non-fatal trauma-related hospitalizations among older adults. So if we can reduce the risk of falling just by treating hearing loss, that's also another huge benefit.
Lori Walsh: I want to talk a little bit before I let you go about a hearing loss in the time of coronavirus and COVID-19 particularly with two things. And one is this idea of medical trials on hydroxychloroquine and what we know about how that can affect the hearing. What are some of your hesitations about that medication that you want to just have people thinking about?
Lindsey Jorgensen: I think that use of medications, obviously we're all searching for a cure and something that can decrease the severity of these symptoms of this very unknown and scary virus. We're all just trying to find and grasp at something. What we do know is that many of the antimalarial drugs that are being proposed as some of this are what we call ototoxic. And what that means is that it's toxic to your ears.
Now, I'm not saying that if your options are passing away from this coronavirus or use of this drug, obviously I'm going to say, "Please use the drug and we'll deal with the consequences of that." But just jumping on a bandwagon of using a medication to think about the secondary consequences of that, like a significant hearing loss and how that may impact your life if using these drugs is not necessary for life sustaining.
Lori Walsh: And then let's talk a little bit about all of us wearing masks, which is I know if I'm watching the television and one of the journalist has a mask on, it's very frustrating for me and don't as far as I know have any hearing loss. But more and more of us are going to be asked when we return to some sense of normal to be wearing masks in public.
And that means a lot of those visual cues that we all rely on, especially if you're hard of hearing, are going to be taken away from us. That's not only a problem for people who are deaf or hard of hearing in a medical scenario if they're in the hospital. But it's going to be very hard for everyone who's had any kind of hearing loss just walking through the world, isn't it?
Lindsey Jorgensen: Absolutely. So when you're thinking about, majority of us use visual cues and use lip reading and speech reading, we're looking at people's body language. We always say you can see a smile in someone's eyes, but you can't necessarily see their lips moving. Those lip cues give you a lot of information, especially in noisy situations.
So when we're talking about, for example, in a hospital room where there may be different IVs or other things beeping. You're going to use those visual cues to understand what the nurse and the doctor are saying. Well, now in the time of COVID, we're all using masks. I go to the grocery store, I wear a mask. I use all those masks and even I was in line at the grocery store the other day and someone was behind me and I recognize them and I'll we kind of talked at least obviously from six feet apart.
But I recognize that I couldn't even have as good of a conversation with her because I couldn't understand as much as what she was saying because now not only do I not see her visual cues but we're also six feet apart, which decreases the amount that I could understand and hear her.
So they do have masks now that people are making that use that have a clear piece right over the mouthpiece. Some people are using shower curtains to sew in them, like the clear shower curtain part. Or you could use vinyl, but that could really help if you are making masks especially if you're working with someone who has a significant hearing loss, you can put a spot over your mouth so that you could actually see through the mask so that your partner, communication partner could understand what you're saying.
But on these day to day as the social isolation starts to relax and we start to go out into the world, I do see many of us still wearing masks for the public protection. And it is going to be an issue working with any people with hearing loss, so if you're thinking about that majority of the older population is going to have hearing loss. That's definitely a concern when we're talking about the lack of visual cues.
Lori Walsh: Yeah. This is a conversation that's here to stay in a lot of ways to Lindsey, we hope you'll come back in the days ahead when those days of kind of going back into the world and yet preventing a second wave are upon us. Let's talk again about some of those challenges and what people can do to meet them. Even changing the way we with each other.
I know on radio we have specific challenges about not being able to see each other and we address them in certain ways. So that'll be a good conversation for the future too. Lindsey Jorgensen, thank you so much. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time. Lindsey is an-
Lindsey Jorgensen: Thank you so much. I would love to be back on.