By Dongchan Kim
July 23, 2026 · 3 min readSouth Korea, China, Mexico and Brazil reported the most hearing loss in an international comparison published in October 2025, yet only one to six percent of affected people in those countries wear hearing aids.
The gap matters because hearing loss now spreads far beyond the elderly, reaching working-age adults and schoolchildren worldwide.
Researchers writing in BMJ Global Health pooled eight national aging surveys that together covered 28 countries, with most participants in their 60s.
China posted the highest rate, with 65 percent of participants reporting hearing loss but only about one percent of them using a hearing aid.
South Korea followed at 39 percent, and even Brazil, the group's best on treatment, saw just six percent of affected people wearing a device.
The team traced the gap partly to health systems, noting that even in countries where insurance covers hearing aids almost fully, use stays well below full uptake.
Stigma starts early, with research cited in the study finding that children wearing hearing aids get rated as less athletic, confident or healthy.
Gender norms cut in: men in South Korea and China use hearing aids at 1.5 times the rate of women, a gap the authors tie to unequal technology access.
In wealthier regions the picture flips, with hearing aid use reaching 24 percent in Western Europe and 39 percent in Northern Europe.
Those gaps feed a much bigger global problem.
The World Health Organization projects that nearly 2.5 billion people will live with some degree of hearing loss by 2050.
Hearing loss that goes unaddressed already costs the world almost one trillion US dollars every year, the agency estimates.
Aging still drives most of the burden, but new research shows the problem sliding down the age ladder.
A 30-year analysis in Annals of Medicine counted 524 million adults aged 15 to 49 living with hearing loss in 2021, up 56.9 percent since 1992.
The authors tied the surge to population growth and aging and warned that patients keep skewing younger.
The WHO adds that more than one billion young adults risk permanent, avoidable hearing loss from unsafe listening practices.
The threat starts even earlier, and this year's World Hearing Day campaign focused its theme on hearing care for all children.
Campaign organizers count around 90 million school-age children living with hearing loss and say over 60 percent of childhood cases remain preventable.
The WHO lists immunization, good maternal and child care, early treatment of common ear infections and safer listening habits among the steps that prevent such cases.
Where people live and work also shapes who loses hearing, and the United States shows the pattern clearly.
An estimated 37.9 million Americans live with hearing loss in both ears, with rural residents and men affected most, the Associated Press reported.
The AP noted that many rural jobs rely on loud machinery, while hobbies such as hunting, woodworking and riding all-terrain vehicles add to the risk.
The cost of skipping treatment shows up most sharply in research on aging brains.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong followed 61,089 hearing-impaired older adults across 33 countries, including South Korea, in a new study published in Cell Reports Medicine.
Participants whose hearing aids delivered good improvement showed a 14 percent lower risk of probable dementia over an average follow-up of 6.5 years.
The team cautioned that the observational design cannot prove hearing aids directly prevent dementia.
The same study measured hearing aid adoption at just 2.6 percent in middle-income countries against 20 percent in high-income ones, the same divide the country comparison exposed.
Rising hearing loss among younger people, combined with flat device use in the hardest-hit countries, widens the pool of untreated patients that health systems will face by mid-century.
The WHO estimates that scaling up ear and hearing care would cost less than 1.40 US dollars per person each year and return nearly 16 dollars for every dollar invested.
