A Retrospective Examination of the Effect of Diabetes on Sensory Processing in Older Adults.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine retrospectively the impact of diabetes mellitus on auditory, visual, and tactile processing in older adults.

Method: Fourteen (10.4%) of a sample of 135 older adults self-reported the presence of diabetes mellitus in a study of sensory and cognitive processing across the adult lifespan. In this study, the performance of the subgroup with diabetes on a number of psychophysical sensory-processing measures was compared with that of the 121 older adults without diabetes. Measures of sensory processing focused on temporal processing and threshold sensitivity in each of 3 sensory modalities: hearing, vision, and touch.

Results: The subgroup of older adults with diabetes differed significantly (p < .05) from the larger group without diabetes only for measures of auditory temporal-order and temporal-masking identification tasks.

Conclusion: This retrospective study provides additional evidence in support of higher level auditory-processing deficits in older adults with a positive history of diabetes mellitus.