Normal, healthy aging comes with a decline in all bodily functions, including hearing and thinking. Emerging evidence suggests that hearing loss can cause cognitive deficits beyond what would be explained by aging alone. Research is beginning to show that treating hearing loss in these cases may retard, or in some cases reverse, the cognitive decline. It is always reasonable to evaluate hearing in an individual with hearing symptoms, but results from this emerging research suggest that if a patient experiencing cognitive decline additionally has hearing loss, then intervening on the hearing loss may have a beneficial effect on cognition.