'Senior Moments' May Just Be Hearing Loss

Main Category: Hearing / Deafness
Article Date: 13 May 2009 - 2:00 PDT

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Picture yourself at a family dinner. Your grandchild, who speaks softly, is telling a story about their kindergarten class while your adult son calls out from the kitchen, asking if you've heard any news about Aunt Irene. A TV chat show is on in the background. You are having difficulty ignoring the television chatter and separating your son's query from your grandchild's story. Unsure of how to respond, you stumble over your words when you try.

It's a fact of life that our ability to hear declines as we age. More precisely, it's our ability to hear words in noisy situations that suffers the most.

But there is some good news, according to Dr. Bruce Schneider, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded researcher at the University of Toronto. Barring strokes or other neurological disorders, cognitive communication skill - the ability to take the words we hear and extract meaning from them - generally does not decline with age.

"We and others have been able to show that while there are declines in some cognitive abilities, there is preservation of others," says Schneider.

Schneider, who is 66, knows whereof he speaks. "There are certain restaurants where I will no longer eat because the noise level is so high that I cannot converse with anybody at my table." But all things being equal, he says, older adults are just as good at processing what they hear as younger people.

"Let's say I take a person of 22 and someone my age or older and have them listen to the same lecture under noisy conditions. If I ask the older person to recall details from that lecture he will do poorly compared to the younger person. But if I adjust the signal-to-noise ratio so that it's equally hard for the younger and older person to hear the individual words, then the age difference disappears. Older people can process and remember approximately the same amount of information and they are equally good at extracting meaning."

When older adults have difficulty quickly responding to what is said, it is often blamed on a minor cognitive misfiring - a "senior moment." If it happens frequently, senility or even dementia is sometimes suspected. This can have negative consequences.

Older people who are having difficulty following conversations - especially when two or more people are talking at one time - may withdraw from social situations and become isolated. Or they may compensate by using other strategies, such as monopolizing the conversation so they don't have to worry about what others are saying.

A better way to go, says Schneider, is to fix the underlying hearing problem. "Older adults should their hearing checked. They should get hearing aids when they are recommended. And there are things that can be done in society to make things more hearing-friendly and accessible for older adults. We make things accessible for people with other handicaps, but not for people with diminished hearing."

Schneider is beginning a Canada-China project, funded by CIHR, to examine the effects of noise, competing speech, and age on comprehension in Chinese and English listeners. Working with Dr. Liang Li of the University of Peking, he is finding that Mandarin Chinese - a tonal language in which the meaning of a word can change by altering the pitch of a syllable - can pose additional challenges to older adults. Comparing the two languages will give the researchers a better understanding of older adults' language comprehension challenges and could result in better hearing aids.

Source
Canadian Institutes of Health Research