Hearing loss can be isolating, frustrating, and embarrassing. In addition to taking away daily pleasures, it can also threaten your independence.

Age-related hearing loss affects one in three of us by age 65. That shouldn't be surprising. We’ve punished our ears with a lifetime of noise — from lawnmowers and hair dryers to car horns and loud music.

But even as technology may have accelerated hearing loss, it is also offering unprecedented help. New hearing aids — some as small as a jelly bean — are producing greater amplification with less distortion. And surgical advances are providing alternate ways of restoring hearing.

Coping with Hearing Loss: A guide to prevention and treatment gives you a useful understanding of the causes of hearing impairment as well as of the breakthroughs that are helping men and women to minimize the consequences of hearing loss.

This Special Health Report, prepared by Harvard Medical School doctors,will brief you on how hearing loss is measured. It will prepare you to work with an audiologist for an accurate diagnosis, help you determine what to look for in a hearing aid, and offer steps to take to prevent further damage.

The report will also demonstrate which medications can contribute to hearing loss, describe what to do for a burst eardrum, and reveal how treating hearing loss can protect your brain from decline and possibly even from dementia.