Changes in hearing sensitivity over ten years within a cohort of older adults from Gothenburg Sweden: A longitudinal analysis of pure-tone audiometric results at the age of 70 and 80 years.
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Background: Age-related hearing loss in the elderly population of Gothenburg born in 1944. Aims: To investigate changes in hearing sensitivity within a birth cohort (born in 1944) from the Gothenburg H70 study. Methods and materials: Descriptive analysis, cross-sectional and longitudinal, of audiometric data of participants at the age of 70 and 80 collected from the Gothenburg H70 study cohort of 1944. Samples included 1116 participants at the age of 70, 617 participants at the age of 80 and 541 participants longitudinally who had data points in both age samples. Statistical tests used are Student’s t-tests, independent and paired. Results: Statistically significant differences were found between genders in pure-tone averages 4 and high, test-frequency thresholds and ears in the 1944 cohort at the age of 80. Statistically significant longitudinal differences were found in some test-frequency thresholds and ears between and within genders over time, while no significant longitudinal differences were found in pure-tone averages 4 or high over the time span between genders. Conclusions: At the age of 80 within the cohort of 1944 men had statistically worse results for every pure-tone average except for the right ear pure-tone average across four frequencies (0.5-4 kHz), where no significant difference was found between genders. Men showed worse results than women in thresholds for test-frequencies over 1000 Hz in both ears, while women showed worse results than men in test-frequencies below 1000 Hz. Longitudinally the women and men showed a similar amount of decline in both pure-tone averages (PTA4 and PTA-HI). In all findings of significance within this study where ears were compared, the left came out on bottom, pointing to the left ear seeing a greater amount of degradation over the time frame than the right within the cohort of 1944.