The Association Between Hearing Impairment, Vision Impairment, Dual Sensory Impairment, and Serious Cognitive Impairment: Findings from a Population-Based Study of 5.4 million Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Sensory impairments and cognitive impairment are increasing in scope due to the aging population. Objective: To investigate the association between hearing impairment, vision impairment, and dual sensory impairment with cognitive impairment among older adults. Methods: Secondary analysis of a combination of ten consecutive waves (2008-2017) of the nationally representative American Community Survey. The sample included 5.4 million community-dwelling and institutionalized older adults aged 65 and older. Bivariate and logistic regression models were conducted to examine the association hearing impairment, vision impairment, and dual sensory impairment with cognitive impairment. Results: After controlling for age, race, education, and income, older adults with only hearing impairment had more than double the odds of cognitive impairment (OR = 2.66, 95% CI = 2.64, 2.68), while older adults with only vision impairment had more than triple the odds of cognitive impairment (OR = 3.63; 95% CI = 3.59, 3.67). For older adults with dual sensory impairment, the odds of cognitive impairment were eight-fold (OR = 8.16; 95% CI = 8.07, 8.25). Similar trends were apparent in each sex and age cohort. Conclusion: Hearing and vision impairment are both independently associated with cognitive impairment. However, dual sensory impairment is associated with substantially higher odds of cognitive impairment, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. Practitioners working with older adults may consider treatment for sensory impairments and cognitive impairment concurrently. Future research is needed to determine if the association is causal, and to investigate the effectiveness of common methods of treatment for sensory impairment for reducing the prevalence of cognitive impairment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".