Title:	Psychological and Cognitive Factors in Hearing and Memory: Longitudinal Analyses from the Survey of Health, Age and Retirement in Europe
DNr:	NAISS 2025/22-1284
Project Type:	NAISS Small Compute
Principal Investigator:	Erik Marsja <erik.marsja@liu.se>
Affiliation:	Linköpings universitet
Duration:	2025-09-24 – 2026-10-01
Classification:	50101
Keywords:

Abstract

How hearing changes with age, and how those changes relate to memory and everyday cognition, matters for older people’s functioning and wellbeing. Hearing problems are common before dementia is diagnosed, and hearing aids are one of the most common rehabilitation options for hearing loss, yet evidence on how hearing and hearing-aid use relate to patterns of cognitive ageing across mid to late life is still mixed. Here, we will map longitudinal patterns of cognitive performance and link them to hearing and hearing-aid use using the Survey of Health, Age and Retirement in Europe, which follows more than 200,000 adults across up to nine waves. We will use repeated measures of immediate and delayed word recall and verbal fluency, together with self-reported hearing in quiet and in noise, and hearing-aid status. Our plan is to identify common trajectories of cognitive change and then examine how baseline hearing, incident changes in hearing, and hearing-aid use are related to membership in these trajectories. We will also study psychological and social factors such as depressive symptoms, loneliness, and social network indicators as potential mediators or modifiers of the hearing–cognition link. Analytically, we will combine latent class mixture models to discover data-driven trajectory patterns with mixed-effects models to estimate associations over time, while accounting for repeated observations within persons and core covariates such as baseline age, sex, education, and country. Sensitivity analyses will vary outcome definitions and coding of hearing measures, and will check robustness across birth cohorts and regions. The study will deliver a clear description of typical and atypical paths of cognitive ageing in a large European panel and how these paths relate to hearing and hearing-aid use. We expect to provide practical summaries of trajectory shapes and sizes, simple risk estimates linking hearing to less favourable courses, and an initial view of whether psychological and social factors help explain or buffer these links.