Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)Koesters, Nils BerndMcMenemy, AndrenaJohnson, Christine2023-07-042023-07-042023-08-03Koesters, N.B., McMenemy, A. and Johnson, C. (2025) ‘Assessing the joint prevalence of dementia and hearing loss in Scotland: a growth model for public health planning’, Journal of Public Health, 33(3), pp. 521–530. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-023-02016-x.https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/13270https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-023-02016-xAM replaced with VoR 2023-08-04Aim: Data in Public Health studies often comes in mismatched age groups. This study investigated how mathematical modeling techniques could be used to estimate the number of individuals with dementia and hearing loss in Scotland given heterogeneous age group data. Subject and Methods: Using established criteria for modeling hearing loss, current population level estimates from the Scottish National Records office were employed to calculate general estimates of the number of individuals with hearing loss in Scotland. Additionally, age group models developed by the European Collaboration on Dementia were used to generate estimates of the number of people with dementia in Scotland. To estimate the number of individuals with both conditions, the two models were combined in a single formula. Parameter optimization was performed on various growth models to determine the best fit to the data. Results: The Stannard growth model was found to be the best fit to the data. Conclusion: The prevalence of hearing loss, dementia, and their co-occurrence exhibit a sigmoidal pattern, which is well-captured by the Stannard growth model, a logistic, sigmoidal type model. This study demonstrates the potential of mathematical modeling to provide nuanced and robust estimates of the prevalence of hearing loss, dementia, and their co-occurrence given heterogeneous data sources. A lookup table is provided.521–530enOpen Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Hearing LossDementiaGrowth ModelAge-group MismatchPopulation Based StudiesAgingAging Related DiseaseArticle