Prevalence of hearing aid use among older adults in the United States.

H earing loss is highly prevalent in older adults and has been found to be associated with incident dementia, falls, and poorer cognitive functioning. These associations may be mediated through a causal pathway, but the role of hearing aids and other forms of rehabilitative interventions in possibly mitigating these outcomes remains unknown. To understand the scope of current hearing loss treatment and the extent to which hearing loss remains untreated in the United States, we estimated the overall prevalence of hearing aid use among US adults 50 years and older with audiometric hearing loss using a nationally representative data set.