(202) Aging Well, Sensing Better: Characterizing Patterns of Sensory Loss in Community-Dwelling Older Adults

Introduction: Sensory loss by individual modalities (vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) has a major impact on health outcomes and quality of life in older US adults; however, little is known about how the classical senses form distinct sensory loss profiles that relate to these outcomes.

Methods: The National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) is a longitudinal, nationally representative study of 3,005 older US adults living at home, aged 57-85 at baseline. The five senses were objectively measured in 1,216 older adults, and function was classified as good, fair, or poor. Latent Class Analyses defined sensory profile classes with overlapping impairments. Successive models were fitted with 1-10 classes, and the Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria (AIC, BIC) were used to determine goodness-of-fit. Chi-squared and post-hoc t-tests were used to analyze demographics.

Results: Three latent classes yielded optimal fit (AIC = 24975.51, BIC = 25167.77). Estimated population shares of each class were 79.8%, 16.0%, and 4.30%, with a significantly different distribution of functioning across senses (𝛸2: smell, p = 0.009; all others, p < 0.001). Class 1 has the best function for smell, hearing, and vision (%good = 86.2, 83.1, 87.7, respectively). Class 2 had predominant losses in taste and touch (%fair/poor = 100 and 77.4, respectively); Class 3 had the best sense of taste (%good = 64.2), and the worst sense of vision (%fair/poor = 100). Class 1 was younger (median age = 68, 𝛸2: p < 0.001), majority white (73.9%, 𝛸2: p < 0.001), most educated (25.4% with bachelors or higher, 𝛸2: p = 0.002) and had nearly double the median household income compared to Classes 2 and 3 (𝛸2: p = 0.006); Class 3 was female-predominant (68.5%, 𝛸2: p = 0.020).

Conclusions: Sensory loss occurs not uniformly, but rather in distinct patterns in older US adults. Understanding how demographics and comorbidities contribute to sensory function profiles, as well as how they result in subsequent health outcomes, would allow us to enhance quality of life, reduce healthcare utilization, and strengthen healthy aging initiatives at a population level.