Do you want to know what’s in my jewellery box? An old lady asked me.
I was curious.” Sure, please show me” I replied.
“My spectacles, my denture, my neck collar and now my hearing aids. Not to mention my walking stick” the lady said with a smile. I appreciated the lady for her positive attitude towards life, her acceptance of the situation with grace. This is graceful Aging.
Aging is ought to bring one or many conditions  for instance, poor eyesight, hyper sensitive gums, wrinkles and also hearing loss in some individuals.

As the age advances, permanent changes start appearing in hair cells in the cochlea that is situated in the inner ear and which is responsible for our hearing.

Factors such as heredity/family history of hearing loss, exposure to loud sound, history of untreated ear pathology or infection, diabetes etc can cause hearing loss in advanced age.

What are the signs that point towards hearing loss in advancing age?

• Need to listen to television or music at higher volume.
• Missing out on parts of conversation.
• Failing to respond to sound or a name call occasionally.
• Inability to understand conversation in the presence of background noise especially telephonic conversation.
• Feeling of loneliness.
• Avoiding conversations or keeping quiet & aloof during discussions.

Why does hearing loss affect conversations during above situations? because

• It reduces loudness of speech
• It reduces clarity of speech.
• It affects perception of direction of the sounds.
• It makes speech flat & monotonous because finer aspects of speech such as intonations, accents, stress on certain words are not perceived well.
• It reduces auditory attention span due to which longer conversations become tiring.

Hearing-loss also affects one’s auditory memory.

Auditory memory is a form of working memory, a short term memory, where information received is through ‘listening’.

If speech is not loud enough, not clear, doesn’t sound interesting because it is monotonous and also not heard with full attention because keeping attention for longer duration is tiring then in such a case information received thro listening is not strong enough to be retained in the memory even for the short duration.

In summary.

In advancing age it is not just the loudness of the speech that listener finds it less but also the clarity of the speech. Engagement in conversations is tiring. Retaining information that is received thro’ listening is a challenging task.

This leads to voluntary withdrawal from environment and preference for reduced interaction, resulting into loss of habit of listening and more difficulty in hearing with each advancing year.