The association between obesity, diet quality and hearing loss in older adults

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.

Can Nutritional Intervention for Obesity and Comorbidities Slow Down Age-Related Hearing Impairment?

“…Our previous study in 2009 identified an association between central obesity and ARHI [15]. This observation was subsequently confirmed and validated in several studies that obesity and comorbidities [16], including type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) [17,18,19,20], cardiovascular disease (CVD) [18,19,20,21], and dyslipidemia [18,19,20,21,22,23], significantly increase the risk for ARHI. However, to the best of our knowledge, no reviews have been published that address the role of nutritional interventions for obesity and comorbidities in the prevention of ARHI.…”

Diet quality and hearing loss among middle–older aged adults in the USA: findings from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

“…An Australian study consisting of adults aged 50 years or older reported that total diet score was inversely related to reporting of concurrent vision and hearing loss in a cross-sectional design; however, no significant effect of diet quality on development of vision and hearing loss was observed in the 5-year follow-up (33) . While a recent study of a European cohort has shown no significant associations between diet quality assessed by the Dutch Dietary Guidelines and hearing status in both low and high frequencies, dietary intake assessed by the FFQ in the study may result in larger recall bias (34) . However, our study found a statistically significant positive association between MDS and low-frequency hearing loss among men, in contrast with the results from the other NHANES study examining the role of diet in low-frequency hearing loss (21) .…”

Objectives, design and main findings until 2020 from the Rotterdam Study

“…A general association analysis revealed that hearing loss was independently associated with age, education, systolic blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, BMI, smoking and alcohol consumption [297]. Further exploration of the association between hearing and BMI showed a strong relationship for fat-related BMI, but no clear association with general diet quality [298]. Carotid atherosclerosis was identified as another potential risk factor for hearing loss [131], suggesting an important role of vascular mechanisms in the etiology of hearing loss.…”