Abstract
Background: With the aging population, the prevalence of age-related hearing loss will increase substantially. Prevention requires more knowledge on modifiable risk factors. Obesity and diet quality have been suggested to play a role in the etiology of age-related hearing loss. We aimed to investigate independent associations of body composition and diet quality with age-related hearing loss.Methods: We performed cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses (follow-up: 4.4 years) in the population-based Rotterdam Study. At baseline (2006-2014), 2,906 participants underwent assessment of body composition, diet, and hearing. Of these 2,906 participants, 636 had hearing assessment at follow-up (2014-2016). Association of body composition and of diet quality with hearing loss were examined using multivariable linear regression models.Results: Cross-sectionally, higher body mass index and fat mass index were associated with increased hearing thresholds. These associations did not remain statistically significant at follow-up. We found no associations between overall diet quality and hearing thresholds.Conclusions: This study shows that a higher body mass index, and in particular a higher fat mass index, is related to age-related hearing loss. However, whether maintaining a healthy body composition may actually reduce the effects of age-related hearing loss in the aging population requires further longitudinal population-based research.
Highlights
Age-related hearing loss is highly prevalent among older adults [1, 2], and is characterized by reduced hearing sensitivity and speech understanding, resulting from degeneration of the cochlea or the auditory nerves or both [3]
Effect sizes did not differ between men and women. In this large sample of community-dwelling individuals, we found that adiposity was associated with increased hearing threshold
We found no associations of overall diet quality with agerelated hearing loss
Summary
Age-related hearing loss is highly prevalent among older adults [1, 2], and is characterized by reduced hearing sensitivity and speech understanding, resulting from degeneration of the cochlea or the auditory nerves or both [3]. This requires more knowledge about modifiable risk factors. The prevalence of age-related hearing loss will increase substantially. We aimed to investigate independent associations of body composition and diet quality with age-related hearing loss. Association of body composition and of diet quality with hearing loss were examined using multivariable linear regression models. Results: Cross-sectionally, higher body mass index and fat mass index were associated with increased hearing thresholds. These associations did not remain statistically significant at follow-up. Whether maintaining a healthy body composition may reduce the effects of age-related hearing loss in the aging population requires further longitudinal populationbased research
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