Topic: Age Adjustment in Occupational Hearing Conservation Programs

When: May 13, 2021
2 pm EST 

About the Webinar: The NIOSH tables used by OSHA to adjust occupational audiograms for the effects of age were developed using cross-sectional trends observed across a small dataset (380 men and 206 women). The data for those tables were collected over 50 years ago and therefore do not account for: (1) reductions in hearing loss prevalence; (2) worker ages beyond 60; (3) race/ethnicity differences; and (4) errors in the application of cross-sectional trends to longitudinal changes of individual workers. In this presentation, we describe nationally-representative cross-sectional trends from NHANES (ages 12 to 85+; N=9937) that closely match longitudinal changes in a large group of noise-exposed workers. These results suggest that the age adjustments ("corrections") in the OSHA Hearing Conservation Amendment over-adjust for current age effects, which would reduce the sensitivity of age-adjusted thresholds to noise induced hearing loss.