Sensory Health in Older Adults

Project Objectives

As people get older, hearing loss becomes more common. It can affect how people communicate, stay connected, and feel in daily life. Hearing is also linked to brain health, including memory and thinking. However, hearing is often missing or not well measured in large ageing studies, so we don’t fully understand how it relates to other health areas.

This project aimed to fix this by adding hearing measures to a large Australian ageing study (MAS2). It also looked at how different hearing tests compare, and whether key questionnaires about listening fatigue and empowerment work well in older adults.

Key Findings

The project successfully integrated hearing into the MAS2 study, meaning hearing can now be tracked alongside cognition, vision, and other health measures over time. This creates a valuable dataset for understanding ageing more holistically.

We found that different hearing measures capture different aspects of hearing, rather than measuring the same thing. This is important for both researchers and clinicians when interpreting hearing results in older adults.

We also looked at two questionnaires (VFS-10 and EmpAQ-5). The listening fatigue questionnaire (VFS-10) worked well in older adults. The empowerment questionnaire (EmpAQ-5) was less consistent, mainly because many people had similar scores, making small changes affect results.

Next Steps and Potential Applications

This project sets up future research using MAS2 data. As new data is collected, we will study how hearing changes over time and how it links to brain health and overall health.

Next steps include research papers and ongoing work with UNSW vision researchers.

In the future, this work could:

• Improve how hearing is measured and understood in older adults
• Help identify people at risk of health problems earlier
• Strengthen links between hearing, ageing, and brain health

This work helps build better evidence to support people with hearing difficulties.