Hearing disability in the elderly

Hearing disability increases with hearing impairment and impairment increases with age, especially for persons over the age of 50 years. Older subjects also appear to display an excess disability, additional to that expected from impairment. This paper quantifies the excess disability and its dependence on sex and socio-economic factors. A variety of performance tests and a self-administered questionnaire concerning disability and handicap were conducted in 2,466 subjects aged between 17 and 80 years, although the actual tests varied amongst subjects. Performance tests included words in quiet and sentences in noise. Results showed the expected systematic increase in all disability measures with increasing hearing threshold level. For the performance measures, there was excess disability with age, but for self-report the disability was under-rated by older subjects with mild impairments. Females generally performed better than males and non-manual workers better than manual workers for a given hearing threshold level. There was only a low correlation between the results of performance tests and self-report.