Carhart Memorial LectureHearing Health and Aging Well Objectives: The objectives of the presentation are to highlight connections among research, practice and policy that have evolved over decades to shape current global initiatives to position hearing health in person-centered, integrated, community-based primary care for older adults. From beginning to end, the talk will focus on the importance of hearing for healthy aging in older adults. Design: Historical overviews of research developments pertaining to auditory aging will be presented, including lab-based research, clinical implementation research, and population health research. The connections among these developments will be examined to consider how the creation, dissemination, translation and mobilization of this knowledge has evolved over several decades. A main question will be how these research developments have been driven by and/or address the lived experiences of older adults. Results: Lab-based research has provided knowledge of the sub-types of age-related hearing loss characterized by threshold and sub-threshold changes in auditory processing. Lab-based research has also provided knowledge of the connections between auditory and other aspects of aging, such as cognitive aging. Clinical research has become more advanced in using methodologies to evaluate the psychometric properties of new tests and the effectiveness of interventions. Research has evolved in using larger samples, better research designs and more complex analyses, and a wider range of outcome measures beyond traditional auditory or speech tests. The positioning of hearing in the context of public health has advanced with the increasing inclusion of hearing in research using methods from epidemiology and health promotion. The importance of social determinants of health for hearing healthcare have become obvious. Other inter-disciplinary approaches have also enriched hearing research, including research informed by health psychology to better understand hearing health or research informed by sociology to understand stigma. Finally, inter-professional bridges are being built as clinical education and healthcare systems are being redesigned. Conclusions: Decades of advances on auditory aging have been driven by and address how to optimize aging well for those with age-related hearing loss. There are many ways in which this work resonates with the examples set in the founding work of Raymond Carhart.
Kathy Pichora-Fuller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Gerontology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. For over three decades, she has been an inter-disciplinary ambassador between audiology and psychology. She has translated her research on auditory and cognitive aging to address the rehabilitative needs of older adults with age-related hearing and cognitive impairments, more recently focussing on social engagement and healthy aging. She has served as the audiology expert for the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging and the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging, and has contributed to the WHO World Reports on Hearing and on Aging and Health, as well as the 2022 World Alzheimer Report. She has served on the editorial board of Ear and Hearing for 18 years and was involved in the 2016 special issue on “Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy”, as well as special issues on stigma (2024) and IDEA (2022). She is Past President of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiologists and represents ICRA on the WHO World Hearing Forum. She leads the Hearing in Later Life working group of the International Society of Audiology and represents the ISA on the WHO World Rehabilitation Alliance working group on primary care. She has won the International Award of the American Academy of Audiology and the Lifetime Achievement Award of Speech-Language and Audiology Canada. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
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