LM108 - What’s New About Getting Old? The Clinical Implications of Normal Aging for Audiologists

Normally-aging older adults comprise more than 85% of persons fitted with hearing aids, yet clear, up-to-date guidelines on how to select and fit hearing aids on this population are lacking. This course will review the current research on hearing, auditory processing and cognition on the normally-aging population and how it can be used to better inform the selection and fitting of modern hearing aids.

Summary:

The relationship between hearing loss and dementia is a much studied area of audiology. Over the past decade, dozens of peer reviewed studies have systematically evaluated the relationship between these two common conditions of an aging population. Moreover, the recently published ACHIEVE randomized control trial indicates that hearing aids has the potential to slow cognitive decline in an at-risk older population. What often flies under the radar, however, are the complexities surrounding normally-aging adults who do not have dementia but nevertheless experience a gradual (normal) decline in cognitive abilities as well as hearing loss. This course will review the latest research on hearing loss, cognition in the normally-aging population and how those findings can be applied clinically. Special attention will be paid to a set of recent clinical guidelines, published in June 2023 in Frontiers in Neurology, that review normal aging and its implications for fitting and setting hearing aids.