Figure 1.
Hearing declines from 40–69 years of age.
(A) UK Biobank: Mean DTT speech reception threshold (SRT; better ear) data, corrected for differences in socio-economic between samples. Exponential functions with an additive constant are fitted to the data. (B) National Study of Hearing (UK [14]): Mean pure tone average (PTA) thresholds (0.5, 1, 2, 4 kHz; better ear). (C) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, US [16]): Mean PTA thresholds (0.5–4 kHz). Other data points from NIH Toolbox (US, 2011 [18]), Beaver Dam Epidemiology of Hearing Loss Study (US, 1993 [15]), Blue Mountains Hearing Study (Australia, 1997–2000 [17]).
Table 1.
Characteristics of UK Biobank participants.
Figure 2.
Men report greater difficulty hearing than women.
Prevalence of self-report of (A) hearing difficulty and (B) difficulty hearing speech-in-noise in women and men from 40–70 y.o., corrected for socio-economic.
Table 2.
Noisy workplace and music exposure: objective and subjective effects on hearing.
Table 3.
Modelling speech-in-noise.
Figure 3.
Cognitive performance declines with age.
Cognitive performance of men and women in the UK Biobank study expressed as a mean standardized (z) score for ease of comparison between different tests.
Figure 4.
Better cognition is associated with better hearing.
Relation between mean SRT and mean performance on each cognitive test (by decile of standardized score from 1 = low to 10 = high), all ages (40–69 y.o.) combined.