HEALTH BRIEFING:Hearing difficulties affect one in three people over 60, but Irish people will put up with poor hearing for up to 15 years before seeking help, according to Dr Nina Byrnes (pictured with Peter Carr).
To mark Positive Ageing Week, Hidden Hearing has launched a national hearing screening programme offering 30,000 free hearing tests at any of its 60 centres around the country. The European average of hearing device usage among the population is 15 per cent, but Ireland ranks well below this at 11 per cent.
Significant rise in people seeking sight services
SOME 8,600 more people with sight impairment are being helped by the National Council for the Blind (NCBI) than in 2004, its chief executive, Des Kenny, has said.
Mr Kenny told members of the NCBI at a celebration in Co Monaghan at the weekend that in 2004 the organisation was dealing with 6,400 people countrywide, but this year the figure had risen to almost 15,000. Demand for NCBI services increased by 8 per cent in 2009.
“Of the 1,729 new people who came to use NCBI’s services in 2009, 14 per cent were over the age of 65 and 54 per cent were over 75, bringing the total number of service users to 14,659,” he said.
Total blindness among younger people has been reducing because of better healthcare, new drugs and surgical interventions, and through new techniques of micro-surgery but, he said, there was a rise in a different form of sight-loss which revolves around the diseases of old age.
Mr Kenny announced his organisation was carrying out a “cost of sight loss” study which would show the importance of investing in eye healthcare and rehabilitation.
He said the Central Statistics Office had already shown that in 2006 there were almost 400,000 older people in the country. It has forecast a three-fold increase in this number by 2036 which will give rise to sight-related needs the NCBI must address.
The organisation has said Ireland urgently needs a long-term national vision strategy to plan for and co-ordinate the expected dramatic increase in demand for sight-loss services.
Poll finds wearing glasses is an ageing business
WEARING GLASSES ages people by at least three years, according to a poll.
Those who wear glasses are perceived to be older and tend to be regarded as “geeky” compared with people who do not wear glasses.
On average, glasses wearers were put at 3.3 years older than they actually were, while those aged 45 and over were thought to be five years older.
The UK research by One Poll was based on a survey of 4,000 people, who were split into two groups. The first group was given 10 pictures of people with glasses and asked to guess their ages and discuss their personal attributes. The second group was given 10 pictures of the same people without glasses and asked the same questions.
The results showed a difference in perceived ages, but also found that those who wore glasses were a fifth less likely to be seen as confident and were more likely to be thought of as physically weaker.
They were also more likely to be described as “geeky”, with some people saying they looked as if they were “good with computers”.
Psychologist Dr Glenn Wilson, who analysed the results, said: “This study is interesting as it highlights the snap judgments we make as a society about people when we meet them for the first time.
“In addition to glasses making you look older, it seems we still make the unconscious assertion that people who wear glasses are weaker and less confident.
“This association seems to hark back to the school playground, with a quarter of those surveyed admitting they were teased as a child for wearing glasses.”