Hearing loss is common in older adults. Patients, clinicians, and health care staff often do not recognize hearing loss, particularly in its early stages, and it is undertreated. Age-related hearing loss or presbycusis, the most common type of hearing loss in older adults, is a multifactorial sensorineural loss that frequently includes a component of impaired speech discrimination. Simple office-based screening and evaluation procedures can identify potential hearing disorders, which should prompt audiologic referral to confirm the diagnosis with audiometric testing. The mainstay of treatment is amplification. For many older adults, accepting the need for amplification, selecting and purchasing a hearing aid, and getting accustomed to its use is a daunting and often frustrating process. There are numerous barriers to hearing aid use, the most common of which is dissatisfaction with its performance across a range of sonic environments. Newer digital hearing aids have many features that improve performance, making them potentially more acceptable to users, but they are expensive and are not covered by Medicare. Hearing aids have been demonstrated to improve hearing function and hearing-related quality of life (QOL), but evidence is less robust for improving overall QOL. Depending upon the etiology of the hearing loss, other medical and surgical procedures, including cochlear implantation, may benefit older adults. Older adults with multiple morbidities and who are frail pose specific challenges for the management of hearing loss. These patients may require integration of hearing assessment and treatment as part of functional assessment in an interdisciplinary, team-based approach to care.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 53. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 21 July 2026.
All research outputs
#1,009,559
of 34,410,315 outputs
Outputs from JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association
#8,762
of 42,310 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#4,281
of 208,579 outputs
Outputs of similar age from JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association
#44
of 343 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,410,315 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 97th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 42,310 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 73.1. This one has done well, scoring higher than 79% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 208,579 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 343 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 87% of its contemporaries.
