Hearing Health Foundation — Our Article on Age & Tinnitus

Hi all,

Earlier in 2019, we connected with the Hearing Health Foundation (HHF), an organisation that we follow with great interest, and discussed various means of collaborating with them. To start off with, they invited us to write an article for their magazine, which just got published!

You can find our article here, and attached in PDF version.

Since HHF magazine issues are themed, and the theme of this particular issue was Veterans & Seniors, we were requested to write about that topic. HHF was also interested in us bringing in a quantitative element by analysing some of our existing survey data sets (we've conducted several large scale surveys over the past few years). Hence, while we would have loved to write about veterans and tinnitus — and there surely is a lot to be said about that! — we chose to focus on seniors instead, because in all of our surveys we asked people about their age. So perhaps we could find some interesting distinctions between younger and older people with tinnitus?

As it turns out, we did find some interesting age-related effects. There are notable differences in the presence or absence of certain comorbidities (conditions that often co-occur with tinnitus). For instance, older people with tinnitus are less likely to also have hyperacusis. Older people on average also cope better with their tinnitus and are less likely to seek treatment.

One interesting finding that we did not include in the article, because it didn't fit very well and would have required too much explaining, was that people over 65 have a 50% lower chance than younger people of having somatic tinnitus, i.e. tinnitus that can be changed through head/neck/jaw movements. I thought that was quite a striking finding, and perhaps a topic for future research.

Anyway, let us know what you think!