Welcome to the Keep Hearing newsletter.

Thanks for being here at the start.

There’s no biological reason for humans to lose their hearing. And yet hearing loss is so common it’s believed to be inevitable. Globally, more than a billion people suffer some hearing loss, and more than 360 million are permanently hearing disabled. The prediction is that about 10% of the forecasted world population of 10 billion will be functionally deaf by 2050. The odds are pretty good that you, a family member, friend or neighbor are affected now.

This newsletter is called “Keep Hearing” because that’s what people want, need and deserve. And that’s what our tiny band of hearing science nerds has been working on since the late 1980’s.

Hearing aids can’t fix hearing loss, but that’s been the only remedy available for more than two centuries. And that trend continues today, as do-it-yourself programmable hearing aids become available without a hearing exam or a prescription.

Hearing aids compensate for damaged hearing. They don’t preserve hearing health.

Today seems like a good day to start expanding the small audience that already knows what we’ve been up to all these years, along with explaining what we and others have discovered about the fundamental role inner ear biology plays in maintaining normal hearing and cognitive function, and how that research is being applied to help folks keep the hearing they have, regardless of age.

The research changes the lens through which hearing is viewed, from hearing aids after inevitable hearing loss to lifelong preventive care for hearing. But we have no intention of throwing shade on the hearing aid industry. Hearing aids can help compensate for the damaged or dead inner ear nerve cells your brain depends on for hearing. Regardless of how good these devices are, however, they don’t touch inner ear biology, and offer virtually no protective or restorative impact. In fact, improper programming can create additional injury.

Our work is different. We focus on the brand new, bold idea of retaining lifelong hearing health by applying academic biomedical research and discoveries to stop inner ear damage before it starts. Understandably, people have plenty of questions about that. For many years we’ve mainly used email to answer those questions one person at a time. Several years ago, Chicago-based clinical audiologist Dr. Lori Halvorson AuD started explaining it to her patients, also one person at a time.

This newsletter builds on that foundation, making that information more widely available to a community of readers who share our commitment and motivation to reframe the hearing conversation from emphasizing compensatory devices after permanent hearing damage to proactive, routine, lifelong preventive care for hearing.

If that describes what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place. This newsletter comes from keephearing.org, an advocacy nonprofit for hearing preservation established in 2018 with a mission to facilitate research, disseminate information and promote equal access to hearing preservation therapeutics.

The vast majority of funding for medical research is focused on identifying drug candidates that treat fatal diseases. Hearing impairment is not a fatal disease, so hearing research historically receives comparatively scant funding, and the research also tends to focus on candidate pharmaceuticals – hearing regeneration drugs, specifically – not hearing preservation. Many so-called hearing regen drugs are in the early stages of research, but none are expected to reach the market within the next decade, at the earliest. If and when they do, it’s doubtful they’ll be an effective response to the vast need, as they will likely be expensive, may not provide long term treatment, and require physician administration and side effect monitoring.

Research reports are technical and published in academic journals intended for scholarly audiences, not the general public. However, some research findings are instructive, and may be of interest to scientifically-minded readers, and clinicians dealing with hearing and hearing-related issues like tinnitus and cognitive dysfunction. We plan to report on settled science and ongoing research in those areas too, and when we do, we may request subscribers pay a little to access those posts.

Please click the “Leave a comment” box below to give us your feedback and tell us what you’d like to know more about. Keep in mind that science doesn’t yet have answers to some questions, but we can explain the state of play.

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Notes

The Lancet: Hearing loss prevalence and years lived with disability, 1990–2019: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Disclosure

I have a dog in the hearing preservation hunt, meaning I may have something to gain, depending on what the future brings. I’m a co-inventor on a few of the ACEMg hearing preservation biomedicine patents owned by the University of Michigan, which are licensed to Soundbites Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) and sold under the Soundbites® trademark. I’m a co-founder, minority shareholder and Chief Fulfillment Officer of Soundbites PBC.