Hot off the press: new high-level evidence on hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss

A Cochrane Review on hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss in adults has recently been published (Ferguson et al., 2026). This is an update from the 2017 review, and includes two new outcome domains that are currently hot topics in audiology: mental health and cognition.

Key messages:

For prioritised outcomes:

• Hearing aids likely cause a large improvement in the ability of adults with MMHL to both participate in everyday life and to listen to other people.
• Hearing aids may cause a small improvement in general health-related quality of life.
• Hearing aids may make little to no difference in loneliness.
• It is unclear whether hearing aids result in a difference in working memory.
• It is unclear whether hearing aids cause harm, such as pain or over-exposure to noise, as there was very limited evidence to help us answer this question. 

For non-prioritised outcomes:

• Mental health, three subdomains¹: effect sizes were generally small or negligible, and the certainty of evidence was mostly very low.
• Cognition, eight subdomains²: effect sizes were mostly negligible, and the certainty of evidence was either low or very low.
• Overall for mental health and cognition, these results were not clinically meaningful.

¹Depression, anxiety, social isolation

²Memory, Immediate attention span, set shifting, inhibition, language function, processing speed, visuospatial function, global cognitive performance

What does this mean clinically?

Clinicians can confidently explain that hearing aids are clinically effective and improve both hearing-specific quality of life (i.e. participation in everyday life) and listening ability and may improve general HRQoL.

Clinicians can also explain that evidence is currently limited for mental health and cognitive benefits of hearing aids.

The full review and a separate summary can be found here.

 

Ferguson, M. A., Sarant, J. Z., Bennett, R. J., McIlhiney, P., Badcock, N., & Bothe, E. (2026). Hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss in adults. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews, 2026(8), CD012023.