Introduction Hearing loss affects around 466 million people worldwide.
The Oldenburg Sentence Test (OLSA) is a test procedure for determining speech
perception in background noise with a large number of repeatable test lists.
At the current time, there is no official age standardization of the OLSA for adults.
Furthermore, in addition to the lack of categorization by age, no data is available
for the OLSA regarding the time-of-day dependent performance.
Methods The Gutenberg Health Study (GHS) is an ongoing
population-based study and designed as a single-center, observational, prospective
cohort study. It was initiated at the Mainz University Hospital, Germany, in 2007
and planned to cover the population of the city of Mainz and it´s district
of Mainz-Bingen..
The OLSA was performed in two runs. The SNR 50% threshold was documented for
the test run for each participant.
Results were characterized by age, sex, decade (5 year intervals) and hearing
signal-noise-ratio (SNR) 50%. Furthermore a timestamp was implemented with
an hourly interval. The data for the OLSA 50 % SNR were divided separately
by age cohorts for men and women.
Results Complete data on OLSA was available for 2900 participants
(main cohort).
The 50% signal-noise-ratio for the OLSA showed a mean of -6,94
± 0.99 dB (Group 1 male) and -7,09 ± 0,75 dB
(Group 1 female) with a steady positivation over the course of the age cohorts.
Conclusion A study with this amount of evaluable Oldenburg sentence
tests is a novelty and the results show a representative population of the
population in Mainz and surroundings. By the shown age dependence we postulate an
age standardized scale for the evaluation of the OLSA.
