Population-based age-adjustment tables for use in hearing conservation programs

Abstract

Starting in the 1970s, Larry Royster and his colleagues conducted a series of large-scale studies demonstrating that people with non-Hispanic Black race/ethnicity had better hearing sensitivity than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. One major outcome of this work was the adoption of specific age-related hearing sensitivity expectations by race in the original version of ANSI S3.44. Royster's accomplishments informed our work over the last decade, the goal of which was to develop age-adjustment tables for replacing those used in current U.S. regulations. The old age adjustment tables, which are frequently mislabeled age “corrections”, were developed by NIOSH based on cross-sectional observations available in the 1970s and included relatively few people. We developed nationally representative cross-sectional age trends based on 9,937 audiograms and validated them for men using 76,185 exam records from 9,340 noise-exposed workers. Results indicated that the 1970s-era age adjustments overestimate current trends, which is consistent with multiple studies showing an overall decline in the prevalence of hearing loss within the United States. The results also indicate a substantial reduction in age-related changes among people with non-Hispanic Black race/ethnicity. Our work confirmed and extended Royster's observations in a large regional sample to the U.S. population as a whole.