Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

There has long been a link between hearing loss and cognitive decline in older adults.

A new study led by Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. Frank Lynn finds that providing hearing aids

and other interventions to people over 70 who are at risk of thinking and memory problems

can dramatically slow the rate of mental decline.

Stephanie Desmond talks to him about his new research.

Let's listen.

Frank Lynn, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Stephanie.

So you have an exciting new study in The Lancet about hearing loss and cognitive decline.

And I'm wondering if you could tell us about it.

This has been a long time coming. And what I mean by that is for over a decade now,

research that we've been doing here at Johns Hopkins, or elsewhere, has increasingly been

making a case for how we understand how hearing loss can really impact dementia risk.

And importantly, based on epidemiological studies over the last several years,

that in fact hearing loss may in fact be the largest contributor to dementia out of all known

risk factors. But that's great. It's academically interesting. But fundamentally the question then,

of course, I want to cares about then is that what does that mean if we actually treat hearing loss,

...