Hearing Treatment

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Anchor lead: One reason to know your hearing number is to help you decide if you’d like to treat it, Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’ve ever had your hearing assessed, you may be unaware that your hearing is reported as a number. That number should be more widely used, says Frank Lin, a hearing expert at Johns Hopkins, in a position paper advocating its use. And knowing your number is about to become much more helpful.

Lin: I think there are a few things converged here that make this really appealing to the public too. One is this growing awareness that hearing is important, everyone sort of knows like, their grandparents and their parents have it, the second big thing that’s converging too is that one of our big wins a few years ago in the Senate was getting the over the counter hearing aid pacs passed in Congress. That was set to be enacted, it should have been a few months ago but it got delayed because FDA is swamped with Covid right now. But it should be essentially next year now, which means that beginning of next year, end of next year they’ll be over the counter hearing aids from Samsung, Apple, Bose, companies like that.   :30

Lin says these devices, known now as PADs for personal amplification devices, will then be allowed to be marketed to help with hearing loss. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.