ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1658569
This article is part of the Research TopicTracing Loneliness in Aging: Understanding the Interplay and Exploring Innovative InterventionsView all 5 articles
Investigating associations between hearing, cognition, and social isolation using the Hertfordshire Ageing Study
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 2Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom
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Objectives: 1. To investigate whether hearing threshold predicts cognitive score 10 years later using the Hertfordshire Ageing Study data. 2. To investigate whether hearing threshold predicts social isolation score 10 years later using the Hertfordshire Ageing Study data. Methods: The Hertfordshire Ageing Study (HAS) is a longitudinal cohort study that measured hearing via pure tone audiometry at two time points, and social isolation and cognition variables at the second time point. Linear regression was implemented for both objectives using an unadjusted model, a model controlling for age and gender, and a model controlling for all confounders (sociodemographic, lifestyle and clinical characteristics) relating to the exposure and outcome variables. For interpretability, coefficients were expressed as the expected change in outcome per doubling of hearing threshold. Results: 231 and 254 participants were included in the final analysesis. There was no evidence of statistically or clinically meaningful associations no statistically, or clinically significant evidence found to indicate hearing threshold at timepointTimepoint 1 predicting cognitive score at timepointTimepoint 2, and hearing threshold at timepointTimepoint 1 predicting social isolation at timepointTimepoint 2. Over 10 years, hearing thresholds worsened by an average of 10.5 dB. Higher hearing thresholds were associated with lower MMSE scores (β per doubling of hearing = –1.02, 95% CI –2.07 to 0.03) and with lower social isolation scores (β per doubling = –0.37, 95% CI –1.40 to 0.66). Although these associations were not statistically significant, the confidence intervals suggest that small but potentially meaningful effects cannot be excluded. Conclusion: The lack of evidence of an association despite strong theoretical evidence, may be due to selection bias within the overall cohort study and the sensitivity of the outcome measures used for social isolation and cognition.
Keywords: Epidemiology, Hearing, Cognition, Social Isolation, older adults, Ageing
Received: 02 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Dhanda, Hall, Martin and Pryce. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nisha Dhanda, n.s.dhanda@bham.ac.uk
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