Volume 13
Hormones and Hearing: Menopause and Auditory-Cognitive Aging
Menopause has emerged as an important health topic. It is now recognized that sex hormones and the menopause transition not only affect reproductive health, but health more broadly. Should audiologists be alert to how menopause may be influencing auditory aging and help-seeking for and up-take of audiologic rehabilitation?
What’s New about Getting Older
Fundamentally, people living with hearing loss have a right to be included, and we all have an obligation to advocate for their inclusion. Accessibility is our social responsibility.
The Fountain of Youth: Building Trust with Truth and Stopping Misinformation in Audiology
Health care providers and patients alike can be lured by the false claims of fake authorities about health issues and cures that are too good to be true. Hope springs eternal but too often we may succumb to empty or false hopes. Meanwhile, authentic scientific sources and evidence-based analyses of the benefits (or lack thereof) of treatments have become more difficult to identify. As reality and truth become elusive, trust is eroded. As trusted healthcare professionals, audiologists must preserve and promote truth to safeguard against misinformation.
Volume 12
What’s New about Getting Older?
The reframing of the aging agenda has become a banner for Canadian strategies in research and government initiatives. Indeed, the 2023-28 Strategic Plan of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute on Aging is called Reframing Aging: Empowering Older Adults
What’s New about Getting Older
Beyond improving communication, it is imperative to position hearing healthcare in the broader context of healthy aging because there are important links between hearing health and many physical, mental, and social aspects.
A Fast Note about Slowed Temporal Processing in Older Adults
It is well known that the prevalence of audiometric hearing loss increases markedly as adults age. The hallmark of age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is elevated audiometric thresholds in the high-frequencies. Reduced audibility of high-frequency speech cues can result in difficulties in understanding speech because of misperceptions. Amplification provides solutions but temporal processing problems may continue contributing to difficulties in understanding speech in noise.
Super-Aging, Super-Agers and Super-Hearing: Another Year Older, Another Year Wiser and Healthier
Canada is expected to become a “super-aged” society within the next five years. In 2025, are audiologists poised to become “super-hearing” care experts? 2025 is a super time to transform the old negative view of hearing loss as an age-related decline that leads to more age-related declines into a new positive view of hearing health as a key to healthy aging and even “super aging.”
Volume 11
How Well Do People with Early Onset Hearing Loss Age?
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down for a conversation with a late middle-aged neighbour who has lived with hearing loss since childhood. The conversation gave me some new insights into the differences between how aging adults adjust to late-onset hearing loss and how adults with early-onset hearing loss adjust to aging.
Vision Loss as a New Potentially Modifiable Risk Factor for Dementia
The addition of vision as a new potentially modifiable risk factor for dementia is important for audiologists because many older adults with hearing loss also have vision loss. Reduced opportunities for multisensory integration and cross-modal compensation must be considered in all aspects of hearing care: screening, assessment, recommending technologies, and providing counselling or communication training.
Loneliness is Not an Age-Related Problem that Audiologists Can Solve Alone
Communication enables social relationships. Positive social relationships can have widespread health benefits. In promoting healthy aging, could audiologists do more to overcome the social isolation and loneliness of those living with hearing loss?