Peripheral and Central Aspects of Age-related Hearing Loss

Age-related hearing loss is a multifactorial disease and besides aging as most important risk factor, it is also associated with gender, diabetes mellitus, a higher blood pressure, a higher BMI, smoking, alcohol intake, educational level and worse quality of the brain white matter. Three hypotheses are discussed in this thesis; either hearing loss affects the brain (sensory-deprivation hypothesis), or brain changes affect the hearing (central-component hypothesis), or mutual factors lead to both (common-cause hypothesis).