Two new projects from Piers Dawes
A/Professor Piers Dawes's trial of adult hearing screening
A/Professor Piers Dawes commences a UK NIHR program development grant (£121,161) to ensure primary care records can be used to identify people provided with NHS hearing aids (HAs) for the first time.
Being able to index hearing loss and hearing aid uptake from primary care records would enable population-level studies of the impacts of hearing loss and the benefits of novel hearing care paradigms.
The development grant will lead directly to a large scale randomised controlled trial of systematic adult hearing screening linked to individualised hearing support.
The recent WHO report on hearing called for hearing screening programs to reduce the burden of hearing loss; hearing loss is the 3rd leading cause of years lived with disability globally. Hearing aids have a positive effect on everyday life for adults with hearing loss. But uptake of hearing aids is low and people often wait 10 years before requesting them. Hearing screening may promote higher and timelier uptake of hearing aids.
Despite calls for adult hearing screening, the UK and US governments have demanded evidence for the benefits of systematic hearing screening – Piers’s controlled evaluation of adult hearing screening will supply this evidence.
Piers is seeking to extend this work to Australian contexts, addressing the impacts of hearing impairment in under-served Australian communities.
A/Prof Piers Dawes publishes the Montreal Cognitive Assessment - hearing impaired version
A/Prof Piers Dawes and his SENSEcog project colleagues have published a version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) adapted and validated for people with hearing impairment.
The MoCA is the most widely used screening test for cognitive impairment/dementia. Former President Trump boasted about his exceptional performance on the MoCA, which was given to identify cognitive impairments in the executive leader of the United States.
But as the MoCA is a spoken test, it relies on people having good hearing function. Someone may fail the MoCA due to hearing impairment rather than cognitive impairment. Given how common hearing impairment is in older adults, there is an urgent need for validated cognitive screening assessments for people with hearing impairment.
Working with the MoCA developers in Montreal, Dr Dawes and his SENSEcog project colleagues developed and validated an alternative form of the MoCA for people with hearing impairment. The MoCA-HI has excellent sensitivity and specificity for identifying cognitive impairment in people with hearing loss, with performance comparable to the standard MoCA.
Dr Dawes's MoCA-HI was published this week on the MoCAtest.org website. It is freely available to clinicians and researchers around the world. Translations of the MoCA-HI in French, German, Greek and Portuguese