Hearing impairment and serial word recall in older adults

The objective of this work was to study the differences in performance on a nonauditory memory task between older volunteers with and without hearing impairment. The design was cross-sectional. Three-hundred-forty-four community-dwelling adults aged 55 to 93 years, who volunteered for a mnemonic training class served as participants. Participants' hearing was tested with a Maico MA-27 portable audiometer. The dependent measure was performance on a visually presented serial word recall test. Participants were also asked to report whether they had a problem with their hearing. Hearing impairment was associated with poor performance on a serial word recall task, even after controlling for age-related differences on that task. Hearing acuity appears to be related to serial word recall in older adults. Because auditory presentations were not involved, this relation raises the question of whether hearing loss may be concomitant with other changes that affect cognitive abilities.