Number of Americans with Hearing Loss

By John Waldo

January 2010

Editor: John Waldo is an attorney and a dedicated advocate for people with hearing loss. As you can imagine, he needs to know how many Americans have hearing loss, and he must be able to defend his numbers. Here he is with his thoughts on which numbers are the best to use and why!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In my advocacy work, the question comes up constantly of "how many people are we talking about." So I've spent some time trying to find what I think are the most solid, defensible numbers.

My favorite study -- the one I refer to as the "gold standard" -- was published in August of 2008 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the peer-reviewed "official" journals of the American Medical Association. The study was authored by Yuri Agrawal, a resident at Johns Hopkins University, who worked under the supervision of John Niparko, the head of the ENT department at Hopkins, which department is frequently ranked as the nation's best.

In addition to the unimpeachable source, there are two things I particularly like about the Hopkins study. First, the results are based not on self-reporting, but on actual audiograms of a very large and randomly selected sample of the U.S. population. Second, the study specifically defines what it means by "hearing loss" -- actually, there are several definitions.

The definition that I found the most meaningful is a binaural hearing loss of 25dB or greater in the speech frequencies. That definition is widely accepted as being the point at which hearing loss ceases to be a mere inconvenience, and becomes "handicapping" because it interferes with the ability to understand speech.

Using that definition, the Hopkins study found that overall, 7.8 percent of the adult population between ages 20 and 69 have a handicapping hearing loss.

Not surprisingly, the prevalence of hearing loss increases dramatically with age. Only six-tenths of one percent of adults between 20 and 29 have a handicapping loss. But between 60 and 69, the prevalence of adults with a handicapping loss increases to 31 percent. Unfortunately, the Hopkins data do not include people 70 and over, but we all know that hearing continues to deteriorate past that age.

When I apply those numbers to Census Bureau figures about population by age, and make the very conservative assumption that the prevalence of hearing loss continues to be 31 percent after age 70, I come out with about 25 million people with a significant, handicapping hearing loss.