This research work forms the first part of a long-term project designed to provide a framework for facilitating hearing aids tuning. The present study focuses on the setting up of automatic measures of speech intelligibility for the recognition of isolated words and sentences. Both materials were degraded in order to simulate presbycusis effects on speech perception. Automatic measures based on...

As a means of partially distinguishing age effects and other risk factors in presbyacusis, hearing thresholds for 56- to 65-year-old participants screened for exclusion of selected risk factors were compared with thresholds for 48- to 55-year-old participants without the same risk factors. Hearing thresholds for both age groups were also compared with age-appropriate International Standards Org...

Sensorineural hearing loss in elderly patients (presbycusis) relatively often coexists with annoying tinnitus (termed presbytinnitus [PT] by Claussen). The purpose of this study was to verify the conditions of improvement in patients treated for PT. We fitted with hearing aids 33 PT patients (ages 60-89 years) and questioned them about subjective hearing results. Assessment tools included compr...

Three groups of subjects, children, young adults, and elderly persons with presbyacusis, were tested in a directed attention, quasidichotic paradigm in which continuous speech was monitored for syntactically and/or semantically anomalous words. The task evoked an event-related potential (ERP) characterized by a positive peak in the latency region of 600 to 1,000 msec. ERPs were separately avera...

A recent article in the Archives investigated the prevalence of hearing loss among US adults aged 20 to 69 years, based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 1999-2004). A hearing loss prevalence of 16.1% was observed in this study. In addition, associations between demographic characteristics, noise exposure, cardiovascular risk factors, and hearing loss we...

Introduction: Presbycusis or age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is a ubiquitous health problem. It is estimated that it will affect up to 1.5 billion people by 2025. In addition, tinnitus occurs in a large majority of cases with presbycusis. Glutamate metabotropic receptor 7 (GRM7) and N-acetyltransferase 2 (NAT2) are some of the genetic markers for presbycusis. Objectives: To explore patterns of ...