Hearing, Vision Impairment Confines Older Adults to Their Homes

A new study revealed that older adults with vision and hearing related problems remain confined to home, which leads to their reduced participation at social events.

Social relationships and situations provide older adults opportunity to meet and interact with other people. This is crucial as it boosts the older adults' quality of life. But in the latest study, conducted by researchers at the Gerontology Research Center, it was found that impaired vision and hearing restricts older adults from interacting with others at social situations.

According to Anne Viljanen, sensory impairment was common among older adults. Nearly one-third of Europeans of around 50 years of age or older were diagnosed with impaired hearing, vision or both sensory functions. 

They noticed that older adults with hearing impairment take part in group activities and socialize with friends less often than those with good hearing abilities. For the less fortunate ones, group activities are extremely challenging as they face difficulty in conversing with people in noisy environment. It was also observed that those with hearing problem perceived their ability to live their lives as they would like as poorer than those with good hearing abilities.

This fining is a part of LISPE (Life-Space Mobility in Old Age) study that included 848 community dwelling adults, aged between 75-90 years. On interviewing the subjects it was discovered that half of them had some difficulties and 1 in every 10 faced a major problem while conversing with other people in a noisy area.

Conducted in collaboration with the University of Sothern Denmark, the data was retrieved by the SHARE (Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe) project - which includes 11 European countries. Over 27,000 of them, aged 50 years and older, were from Nordic countries, Central Europe and the Mediterranean countries.

They looked for the prevalence of hearing and vision impairment and whether the sensory impairments were associated with social activity. Those with hearing and vision problems were less socially active when compared to those without sensory problems.

Tuija Mikkola's study is part of a broader LISPE. Mikkola and Viljanen believe "preventive and rehabilitative measures are important in order to support older people with sensory impairments in living socially active lives. It is possible to compensate an impairment of one sense to some extent, for example people with hearing problems are more likely to use visual cues of speech. Thus, it is important to converse face-to-face with people with impaired hearing as it helps facilitate lip-reading. Concomitant hearing and visual impairment also requires special skills from healthcare and rehabilitation personnel, as well as close collaboration between different healthcare specialists."

The results have been published in international scientific journals.