SS08: HEARING SCREENING IN ADULTS
Wednesday 24th / 08:00 am / Room Tenerife
Hearing loss is one of the most common chronic health conditions in the elderly population with important implications for patient quality of life. The diminished ability to hear and to communicate is frustrating in and of itself, but the strong association of hearing loss with depression and functional decline adds further to the burden on individuals who are hearing impaired.
Despite the prevalence and burden of hearing loss, hearing impairment is largely underdiagnosed in older persons and undertreated. Too often, the public and still too many health care professionals underestimate the dramatic effects of deafness. Therefore, it can be of some assistance to accelerate a process of identification and remediation of hearing loss by the implementation of screening programmes. As an example in Europe, UK and a few other European countries are ready to implement nationwide programs/services, but the penetration of early hearing detection and intervention programmes differs greatly from country to country.
In this context, the European Commission decided to finance a project titled “AHEAD III: Assessment of Hearing in the Elderly: Aging and Degeneration - Integration through Immediate Intervention” (2008-2010). Project AHEAD III involves a network of top-notch laboratories and clinics all around Europe with complementary capacities and expertise, in an area where the multidisciplinarity of the topics so require.
This project is triggering research in an area where this topic is gaining an increasing momentum, but still has remained in stand-by for decades. Project AHEAD III is exploring novel strategies to make screening and early intervention a feasible part of routine care. The session will presented the main objectives and first outcomes of the project.
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