Age-Related Hearing Loss

 

Hearing loss is the third most common chronic condition reported by elderly people. The estimated prevalence of significant hearing impairment among people over the age of 65 is approximately 40 to 45 percent and among people over the age of 70 exceeds 83 percent. Hearing sensitivity declines gradually and progressively with aging. It may not be noticeable until lost ability to hear in advanced stage. It seems to run in families and may occur because of changes in the inner ear and auditory nerve. Age-related hearing loss, or Presbycusis, usually occurs in both ears, affecting them equally and permanently.

In general, the average hearing thresholds of men are typically poorer than those of women in the high frequencies, with men exhibiting a sharply sloping hearing loss in the moderately severe range in the high frequencies, and the women exhibiting a more gradual sloping hearing loss in the moderate range in the high frequencies. Perhaps the most important consequence of the decline in hearing sensitivity with aging is difficulty understanding speech. Multiple sources are thought to contribute to the communication deficits of elderly people, including hearing loss, cognitive decline, and slowed temporal processing. Processing brief changes in stimulus duration and presentation rate for signals embedded in sequences are notably difficult for elderly people, which suggests that auditory temporal processing deficits may relate to the observed problems in understanding rapid speech and accented English.

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