ASSESSING HEARING LOSS IN USERS OF CENTRES FOR HEALTHY AGING IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Abstract

Aging is associated with several complications and may result in the decline of important processes in the body including the sensory pathways and cognition. The risk of acquiring a hearing loss becomes significantly higher as one ages. Forgoing one’s social life as a person ages may contribute to the deterioration of hearing disability in older people, and therefore healthy aging is an important concept in this regard. This research aims at assessing the prevalence of a hearing loss in users of Centers for Healthy Aging (CHA) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. CHAs are communities where older people gather to socialize and interact. The auditory assessment of the participants was carried out using a combination of two previously designed questionnaires. Hearing related questions were taken from the UK Biobank survey to check the presence and degree of the hearing disability in the sample. Hearing handicap was assessed using questions from the screening version of the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly (HHIE-S). These questions were aimed at analyzing the handicap faced by the old people in the context of their social and emotional life. Quantitative primary data of 460 participants was collected in person at the centers using electronic tablets. The data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel, and descriptive graphs for the responses of every question were generated. The responses to the questions in the UK Biobank survey suggest that the percentage of a hearing disability in the participants was very low. Furthermore, the use of hearing interventions was very uncommon. In addition to that, only a small number of participants had engaged in activities that may increase their risk of developing a hearing loss such as listening to music on a high volume. The response to the HHIE questionnaire was analyzed in two ways. All the questions were separately assessed similar to the Biobank survey, and the total HHIE score of each participant was also calculated according to a previously designed score. 1.97 percent of the participants reported feeling severely handicapped due to their hearing disability. The low prevalence of hearing disability and handicap in our participants suggests that actively engaging in social interactions may reduce the risk of developing a hearing disability, and its crippling effects. Also, CHAs may be a difficult acoustic setting for people with hearing loss, so perhaps they are dissuaded from attending social places in the first place, this can be clarified by further research and objective hearing tests. Secondary data was collected by searching for previous studies done in similar contexts, and it was found that the accuracy of HHIE is low when it comes to the detection of a low-moderate hearing loss and elderly fail to self-report their hearing impairment. Further assessment to confirm the diagnosis of this research, is therefore, recommended.