Analysis shows hearing impairments indicate health status in adults, suggesting implications for social support access.
The results suggest that hearing impairments are not likely to be direct determinants of mortality risk, but rather an indicator of overall health and of the differing pathways to current health status for younger and older adults. Future work should avoid essentializing the experiences of adults with hearing impairment and strive to distinguish between these pathways to deafness in efforts to better understand how access to supportive social networks impacts health.
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Denney et al. (2026) studied this question.
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