Quantifying the Global Cost of Untreated Hearing Loss

For business partners, investors, and public health strategists, the question surrounding hearing health is not just clinical, it’s economic. Untreated hearing loss is a global health crisis that carries a staggering, quantifiable socioeconomic burden, impacting everything from global productivity to healthcare expenditures.

The investment case for scalable, affordable digital hearing solutions, such as those provided by eargym, rests firmly on mitigating these massive costs through early detection and intervention.

The Global Financial Burden of Untreated Hearing Loss

The most comprehensive studies have attempted to model the total worldwide cost attributable to untreated hearing loss across all age groups.

The sheer scale of this burden is documented by major global health initiatives:

• Total annual cost: Analysis from the World Health Organization (WHO) and associated economic modeling estimate the global cost of unaddressed hearing loss at nearly $1 trillion US dollars annually (1). This figure includes direct medical expenses, support costs, and, crucially, the large-scale costs of societal exclusion and lost productivity.

• Productivity losses: A significant portion of this economic impact stems from lost productivity and employment challenges. Untreated hearing loss creates barriers to education and job acquisition, and leads to reduced lifetime earning potential. According to the WHO, these losses are complex to quantify but are conservatively estimated to account for hundreds of billions of dollars globally (1).

The Compounding Cost in Older Adults: Cognition and Care

The costs of untreated hearing loss are compounded exponentially in older populations due to the strong bidirectional link between hearing and cognitive function. Untreated hearing loss is now recognised as the single largest modifiable risk factor for dementia (2).

1. Increased Healthcare Utilisation

Hearing loss exacerbates health conditions by promoting social isolation, increasing depression rates, and making it difficult for patients to adhere to medical instructions.

• Foley DM et al. (2014) have shown that adults aged 65 years or older with untreated hearing loss have significantly higher healthcare utilisation costs compared to those with normal hearing (3). This includes more frequent hospital stays, increased emergency room visits, and higher medication costs. These downstream effects create a measurable strain on national health systems.

  
  

2. The Link to Cognitive Decline

The established causal link between untreated hearing loss and accelerated cognitive decline, driven by increased cognitive load and subsequent atrophy of relevant brain regions, presents a critical investment opportunity.

• Livingston et al. (2020) also highlighted that mitigating untreated hearing loss could significantly impact the global dementia burden. The authors estimated that 8.2% of global dementia cases are attributable to hearing loss, making it the largest single risk factor in their model (2). 

  
  

Investing in early hearing intervention is therefore an investment in reducing the risk of incidence and progression of one of the costliest diseases of ageing.

The Investment Solution: Digital, Scalable Screening

According to the WHO (1), currently more than 1.5 billion people (nearly 20% of the global population) live with hearing loss.

This means that addressing this $980 billion USD annually problem (1) requires scalable, early intervention strategies. Traditional clinical audiometry cannot meet this demand due to cost, geographical barriers, and the scarcity of trained professionals.

Digital, medical-grade testing platforms offer the necessary solution by meeting three crucial criteria for economic scalability:

1. Accessibility and affordability: Remote, at-home testing dramatically reduces the cost per test and removes logistical barriers to screening large populations (e.g., primary care cohorts, employee wellness programs).

2. Sensitivity to functional change: Dawes, P. et al. (2014) showed that by leveraging Speech-in-Noise (SiN) testing, platforms can identify the functionally relevant deficits (listening effort and cognitive strain) that lead to high downstream health costs, offering a metric highly correlated with future risk (4).

3. Data integration: Digital platforms can provide standardised, continuous data essential for health insurance risk models, enabling payers and partners to track population health shifts and quantify the return on investment (ROI) from early intervention.

In summary, the socioeconomic evidence presents untreated hearing loss not just as a clinical issue, but as a major financial risk factor. Scalable digital screening and assessment represents a vital, economically sound path toward reducing the massive, quantifiable global burden of untreated hearing loss.

For companies looking to enhance employee well-being and productivity, investors seeking to back scalable health-tech solutions with massive market potential, or healthcare organisations aiming to integrate cutting-edge digital screening, eargym offers a validated, proven solution. We invite you to join us in revolutionising hearing health. To explore partnership opportunities and discuss how eargym’s technology can align with your strategic goals, please contact our business development team today.

References

1. World Health Organization (WHO). (2021). World Report on Hearing. Geneva: World Health Organization.

2. Livingston, G., Huntley, J., Sommerlad, A., Ames, D., Ballard, C., Banerjee, S., Brayne, C., Burns, A., Cohen-Mansfield, J., Cooper, C., Fox, N., Gitlin, L. N., Howard, R., Kales, H. C., Kivipelto, M., Larson, E. B., Ogunniyi, A., Orgeta, V., Peters, R., ... Walker, H. (2020). Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2020 report of the Lancet Commission. The Lancet, 396(10248), 413–446. $10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30367-6$

3. Foley DM, Frick KD, Lin FR. Association between hearing loss and healthcare expenditures in older adults. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2014 Jun;62(6):1188-9. doi: 10.1111/jgs.12864. PMID: 24925555; PMCID: PMC4058650.

4. Dawes, P., Fortnum, H., Moore, D. R., Emsley, R., & Norman, P. (2014). Relation between speech-in-noise threshold, hearing loss and cognition from 40–69 years of age. PLoS One, 9(9), e107720. $10.1371/journal.journal.pone.0107720$