# What Causes Hearing Loss: Advancing the Methods

> **NIH NIH R01** · HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH · 2024 · $507,871

## Abstract

Project Summary / Abstract
Traditional methods for estimating exposure-hearing relations, which typically use pure-tone average hearing
thresholds to define the outcome, may not comprehensively capture useful information encompassed by the
shape of the audiogram across the range of frequencies. Since existing statistical methods are insufficient for
analysis of the audiogram shape data, built on our previous work (R01DC017717) on dealing with multi-layers
of correlation structures in hearing data, we will develop rigorous and robust analytical methods for estimating
exposure-hearing relations when the outcomes are hearing phenotypes characterized by audiogram shapes,
either from supervised learning methods with pre-specified phenotype categories or unsupervised learning
methods with phenotype categories determined solely by the data at hands. In addition, current analytical
methods rely on either pure-tone audiometry data or self-reported hearing data as the outcome, but not both;
these two outcome measures are in fact complementary, and we will develop statistical methods for integrating
the pure-tone audiometric data and self-reported data. We will apply the hearing data analysis methods to the
Conservation of Hearing Study within the Nurses’ Health Study II, the Medical University of South Carolina
Hearing Study, and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). User-friendly publicly
available software development will be a central feature accompanying all new methods to be developed. We
have formed an interdisciplinary team of theoretical and applied statisticians, epidemiologists and hearing
experts, and we expect to be well equipped to solve the challenging problems that have been identified.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10882797
- **Project number:** 2R01DC017717-04A1
- **Recipient organization:** HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
- **Principal Investigator:** Molin Wang
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $507,871
- **Award type:** 2
- **Project period:** 2019-09-13 → 2028-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10882797

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10882797, What Causes Hearing Loss: Advancing the Methods (2R01DC017717-04A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-01 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10882797. Licensed CC0.

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