The Influence of Social Interaction and Physical Health on the Association Between Hearing and Depression With Age and Gender.
Gitte Keidser, Mark Seeto
PMID 28752806WHAT IT FOUND
In 134,357 UK adults aged 40 to 69, reported difficulty following conversations in background noise was linked to more depression, especially low mood and worry.
The link remained after illness, unemployment and social isolation. It does not show hearing caused depression.
Key findings
01Poor hearing was significantly associated with more depressive episodes in all age groups and for both genders, but the association was weak (b < .2).
02The hearing-depression association was stronger for depressive symptoms than for depressive episodes, with medium associations and the greatest estimate for males in their 40s (b = .36).
03When the analysis used only the behavioral hearing test, poor hearing was not significantly linked to depressive episodes, but showed significant, very small links with depressive symptoms.
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What it does not show
The data are cross-sectional, so it cannot tell whether hearing difficulty leads to depression or depressed people report more hearing difficulty. The main hearing variable was dominated by self-reported difficulty; when only the behavioral hearing test was used, the association with depressive episodes was not significant. UK Biobank participants had a low response rate of 5.4% and may be healthier and more affluent than the general population. The depression variables were not directly tied to psychiatric diagnoses, and the measures were short, nonstandardized, and partly binary or ordinal. Social isolation measured frequency of contacts and group activities, not satisfaction or quality of interactions. Unemployment may have misclassified people who were unable to work because of sickness or disability or retired.
Declared interests
Funded by The HEARing Cooperative Research Centre, The Australian Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, and The Swedish Research Council. The supplied text does not list author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing difficulty causes depression or that hearing treatment will improve mood. The study is cross-sectional, the strongest hearing-depression link came from self-reported hearing difficulty, and no treatment was tested.