Auditory Functional Age

Abstract

In the audiologic research of the Boston VA Normative Aging Study, an auditory age measure has been developed to represent the extent to which an individual is older or younger than his age peers in terms of his hearing ability. Sixteen auditory measures were placed in a stepwise regression procedure: air and bone conduction hearing at various frequencies, speech reception thresholds, speech discrimination scores, and two and three frequency averages. With chronological age as criterion, the resulting equation yielded an auditory age calculated from two variables: air conduction at 8,000 cps and speech reception threshold. Because of redundancy among the larger number of measures, these two effectively index the larger number. The two include high and low frequency measures so are sensitive to high frequency loss at older age.