I think public awareness is a very important factor. When we think of early detection and intervention, we often think of children or babies, but we also need to be looking at our healthy adults and ensuring they understand the importance of early identification and intervention of hearing loss.
Right now, it takes people about seven to 10 years to seek help from the time they first notice a hearing impairment, and there's a lot of damage that can be done in that time. What is important is the earlier you do suspect a hearing loss you should be going for help, and we need to be educating the public about that. Certainly, with senior-related hearing loss, the typical intervention would be hearing aids, but that's not the only intervention that's out there as an option. In terms of wearing hearing aids, the earlier you start that, the more acclimated you become, the more your brain then relearns to hear all these sounds you haven't heard.
We find that with the elderly, hearing aid acceptance goes down tremendously when they can't manipulate the hearing aids. When you start a little earlier, you become a little more accustomed to all of that. It doesn't mean you're not going to have dexterity issues when you get a little older, but when dexterity and vision start to be compromised, it becomes even more difficult. If an 80-year-old is starting to wear hearing aids for the first time, it's much more difficult. They've lost a significant amount of time of auditory input, and that deprivation is what also leads people to withdraw and to become isolated. Hearing aids have been shown to correlate to less feelings of loneliness, but also lower scores on depression scales.
I think public awareness is very important.