Hearing Impairment and Depressive Symptoms: A Risk Assessment

I read the article by Lisan et al1 with great interest. The authors conducted a prospective study to investigate the effect of hearing impairment on the incident of depressive symptoms of subjects in a community, ages 50-75 years. Hearing impairment was defined as a pure tone average >25 dB in the better ear, and depressive symptoms were measured using the validated 13-item Questionnaire of Depression, 2nd version. Adjusted odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) of hearing impairment for incident depressive symptoms was 1.36 (1.06-1.73).