The triumph of CODA at the Academy Awards last night, which won Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Screenplay, should go a long way towards raising awareness of the Deaf — and maybe also of the Hard of Hearing.

The film is a funny and very moving portrayal of a Deaf family who live in a small fishing town where everyone else is hearing. CODA stands for Child of Deaf Adults. In the film, 17-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the CODA. Father (Troy Kotsur, who won Best Supporting Actor), mother (Marlee Matlin, who won Best Actress for Children of  Lesser God in 1987) and young adult son (Daniel Durant) are Deaf.

The movie is fully captioned for those who want captions. For others, just the signed portions are captioned. Last night the CODA winners each had sign-language interpreters at their side. Their thanks to the Academy and their families and their colleagues were all the more emotional as the interpreters beautifully, almost lyrically, signed their words to the Deaf who were watching. The speeches – and the signed words – felt joyous.

Making spoken words comprehensible to non-signers, like me, is less an art and more a skill. The best captions are provided by a CART captioner, a professional who has trained to simultaneously provide live captions. (CART stands for Communication Access Real Time.)

You can get captions on your TV by activating Closed Captions, but the results will be mixed. If the show is live, like news or sports – or the Academy Awards – the captions will lag behind the speech and also get a lot wrong. This is most likely because they are using automated speech recognition, rather than CART captioners. Why the Academy and the networks can’t hire highly skilled CART captioners is beyond me. Further, the commercials are rarely captioned. Don’t advertisers want the substantial number of viewers with hearing loss to buy their products? Marlee Matlin was an early supporter of captions on TV, testifying in 1995 before Congress. We have captions on TV thanks in part to Matlin. Now we just need to get simultaneous and accurate captioning on TV. That shouldn’t be hard. Hire CART captioners! Spend a little money!

Signing plays a role in another of this year’s Oscar winners. Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, won Best International Feature. The movie is ostensibly about a Japanese director staging a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival workshop in Hiroshima. As he’s auditioning actors from all over Asia, who will speak their lines each in their native tongue, a festival representative translates for the director. One actor uses Korean Sign Language. Rather than the fluid musical gestures of American Sign Language, Korean Sign Language – in this scene — is sharp, with emphatic slapping of palms, arms, chest – a little in the same way that Korean (and Japanese) sound staccato to an English speaker. It’s a fascinating glimpse of another Deaf Culture’s language. The signing actor plays Sonya, whose vision of a future where the grief of the present will give way to peace ends the play. The signing here is gentle, spiritual, hopeful, completely unlike what we’ve seen earlier.

I wrote about CODA in 2021 when the movie came out, about a scene where Ruby is performing in a concert. Her singing is mesmerizing, but when the camera shifts to her Deaf family in the audience, the sound cuts out. They are hearing – and understanding – nothing. They are clearly restless and start signing to each other about what to have for dinner. If I were in that audience, I wrote, I also would not be able to appreciate Ruby’s singing. But instead of silence I’d hear a cacophony of sound. Without any visual information (captions, expressive gestures), I might not even know it was music. Where her parents are encased in silence, I’d be turning my hearing aids down.

In the end Ruby finds a way to share her singing with her parents – and with me. The solution is to incorporate a visual component, giving expression to the words without actually understanding them. In Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, the intention is also to give expression to the words even though neither the other actors nor the audience speaks the language (although they are subtitled in the movie, and in the theater when the play is produced). A recent essay in the Atlantic by Nina Li Coomes discussed the film in terms of the fluidity of language in a world where we can get instant translation on our smart phones. “Even if you don’t understand all the words being spoken in the script,” she wrote, “trust that the emotional response you have will be genuine.” Sonya’s signed words evoke an emotional response that feels true.

I’d still rather understand all the words, but being given visual or inflective means to understand the intent – and to respond to it emotionally — is a gift.

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For more about living with hearing loss, read my books “Smart Hearing: Strategies, Skills and Resources for Living Better With Hearing Loss” and “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I and 50 Million Other Americans Can’t Hear You.” Both are available as ebook and paperback on Amazon.com.

Recently I was invited to write an editorial referencing two studies on the effect of hearing on healthy aging. The article has just been published, in the Journals of Gerontology. Most readers won’t be able to access it, so I’m reprinting the text here. The title is “The Importance of Hearing in Maintaining Overall Functioning as We Age.” It’s a bit more formal than my posts are, and it’s edited a bit here for clarity.

As my hearing deteriorated in the decades following my initial loss at age 30, I worried that I would go deaf. Now, I worry that I will lose my cognitive faculties. The specter of dementia looms large for people with severe hearing loss. The statistical association between hearing loss, depression, and cognitive decline is well documented. What is not known is whether the association is causal, or shares a common pathogen, or is related in some other way. To explore this, a major study, the Achieve Study, is underway to see if hearing aids help reduce the risk.

The threat of cognitive decline is often cited as a reason to correct your hearing loss—to get hearing aids or cochlear implants or other hearing devices. But as people with severe hearing loss know, these do not fully correct hearing. I have worn hearing aids for more than 30 years. Twelve years ago, I replaced one aid with a cochlear implant, when the aid stopped being helpful. Certainly, I hear better with hearing aids than without. But I can hear adequately only under the best circumstances: in a quiet environment or with 1 or 2 other speakers who speak slowly and clearly. Adding even a fourth speaker to that conversation increases the likelihood of 2 people talking at once. When that happens, I cannot follow anything.

I have long worried that my corrected but far from normal hearing puts me in the same category as someone with untreated loss. One of the articles the journal asked me to comment on confirmed my suspicion. A study by Katharine K. Brewster and others from the Departments of Psychiatry and Otolaryngology at Columbia, Age-Related Hearing Loss, Late-Life Depression, and Risk of Dementia in Older Adults, studied 8529 participants.  Of those 6478 were classified as having no hearing loss, 1102 as having treated hearing loss, and 949 as having untreated hearing loss. The last category included people who had hearing aids but had “hearing impairment despite hearing aid use.” All 8529 participants were free of cognitive decline at the start of the study.

Depressing but not surprising: Individuals with treated hearing loss were at higher risk for depression as well as dementia than those with no hearing loss. But, confounding expectation, they were also at higher risk than those with untreated hearing loss. As the authors wrote, “We expected treatment of hearing loss would be protective against adverse neuropsychiatric consequences.”

What could explain this? The first possibility is an error, meaning the results need to be replicated by future studies. There is also the possibility that hearing aid treatment itself has harmful effects on mood, which the authors thought unlikely. Their preferred explanation was that people who get hearing aids have hearing loss that is both more severe and of longer duration. This more severe loss increases the risk of depression and dementia. Because the efficacy of treatment was self-reported to clinicians—rather than tested audiometrically—it is also possible that some of those with treated loss were not receiving adequate hearing treatment.

The third explanation—that people with treated hearing loss usually have longer-occurring and more severe hearing loss—makes sense. Statistics show that it takes 7 years from the time of diagnosis to purchase of hearing aids, and often even once they own hearing aids many people rarely or never wear them.

But I would not discount the explanation that treatment has a harmful effect on mood.

People who pay $6 000 for hearing aids expect that they will work. They are often dismayed to find that even with their expensive new devices they still cannot hear in restaurants or places where there is background noise. They still need captions to hear TV. They still cannot hear at meetings or lectures. They are told they must buy more devices—assistive listening devices and remote mics. In addition, hearing aids can be troublesome—the batteries run out at inconvenient times or the vents get clogged with ear wax or the charger is not working properly. They are easy to lose. During the pandemic, many found that wearing a mask dislodged hearing aids, and sometimes they fell down sink drains or were lost on the street. Hearing aids by their very presence are a reminder of disability. All this can be very depressing!

It is thought that hearing loss may initiate a deleterious cascade of events including social isolation. Difficulty hearing may affect executive function and result in decreased cognitive reserve. Studies have shown atrophy of brain regions connected to auditory circuits. These “may explain the mechanistic links between hearing loss, depression, and cognitive decline,” they wrote. But the study found that depression was responsible for only 6% of the hearing–dementia relationship. “Hearing loss and depression are independent risk factors” for dementia, but how each affects the other to exacerbate cognitive decline or dementia is not clear.

Even if the mechanisms haven’t been explained, however, the authors advise that because hearing loss and memory problems and depression are so often found together, evaluation of an older patient with symptoms of cognitive decline or depression should include evaluation for hearing loss. This is a much-needed piece of advice. Currently, only 17 to 30 percent of physicians, including gerontologists, screen for hearing loss.

The second study presented here is more heartening or at least part of it is. The Association of Hearing Impairment with Higher Level Physical Functioning and Walking Endurance, an epidemiological study done by researchers at Johns Hopkins, using the long-term Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. It found that hearing loss is linked to poorer physical function, including slower walking. The more severe the loss, as measured audiometrically, the greater the physical decline. The 831 participants with hearing loss, treated or not, overall scored worse in a test of physical performance and walking endurance than people with normal hearing. Over the 6 years of the study, they showed faster rates of decline than participants with normal hearing or mild hearing loss. Vestibular dysfunction was factored in. But, and here is the encouraging news, hearing aid users—regardless of the severity of their loss—walked significantly faster than nonusers.

The authors acknowledged that their study population was more likely to be white and have higher socioeconomic status, both associated with better physical function, than the general population. In addition, hearing aid use was self-reported with answers limited to Yes or No on whether they used hearing aids. But it is still a tantalizing finding. The authors suggest that social isolation, cognitive impairment, and reduced physical activity may play a greater role among the non-hearing aid users. Auditory clues can contribute to balance, and uncorrected hearing loss might affect vestibular function. There is also the possibility that hearing loss and poor physical performance have a common cause.

Another possible explanation occurred to me as I was reading this study. Treating hearing loss takes initiative. People who get hearing aids often must overcome hurdles like lack of access to good hearing health care as well as significant expense, because hearing aids are not covered by most health insurance, including Medicare. Maybe this same initiative contributes to better physical self-care. Just as they have taken the initiative to buy and wear hearing aids, the better performers may have tried to stay healthy in other ways, including diet and exercise.

One takeaway from both these studies is that exercise is good for you. Exercise can ease symptoms of depression (an established risk factor for cognitive decline). The finding that hearing aid users walked longer and faster than nonusers, regardless of the severity of their loss, suggests that “screening for and treatment of hearing loss may delay or slow progression of hearing-related physical decline.” In other words, get your hearing tested and treated, and your overall physical health may benefit.

For more about living with hearing loss, read  Smart Hearing, available on paper or as an e-book at Amazon.com, or Shouting Won’t Help, available in both formats at Amazon and other booksellers.

Nice post on the website of Let’s Loop Seattle, which discusses books for people with hearing loss, including children. You can add your own favorites, either on the original post or on this one. I’m always looking for good new reading on the subject. I’ll be writing about Gael Hannan and Shari Eberts new book, Hear & Beyond, in a future post.

Here’s the URL (which for some reason I can’t link to the title on my page): https://loopseattle.org/2022/02/14/youre-not-alone-books-can-help-you-on-your-hearing-loss-journey/