Candidacy for bilateral hearing aids: a retrospective multicenter study.

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Hearing Science
• Rehabilitation Medicine

Background:

• Hearing aid fittings are crucial for improving quality of life.
• Refining candidacy criteria for bilateral hearing aid fittings is essential for optimal patient outcomes.
• Understanding the factors influencing the success of bilateral hearing aid use is an ongoing area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify factors for refining candidacy criteria for bilateral hearing aid fittings.
• To analyze the relationship between objective parameters and subjective outcomes in hearing aid users.
• To compare the benefits of unilateral versus bilateral hearing aid fittings.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective analysis of 1,000 hearing aid fittings, including case history, audiometric, and rehabilitation data.
• Long-term outcome measures collected via questionnaires from 505 hearing aid users (after at least 2 years of use).
• Matched subgroups of unilateral (n=212) and bilateral (n=477) fittings were created, controlling for age, hearing loss degree, and audiometric asymmetry.

Main Results:

• Bilateral fittings showed significantly higher benefit scores for sound detection, speech intelligibility in reverberation, and sound localization compared to unilateral fittings.
• Users of bilateral hearing aids reported poorer comfort with loud sounds than those with unilateral fittings.
• The level of hearing aid technology did not significantly correlate with the benefits derived from bilateral hearing aid use.

Conclusions:

• Successful bilateral hearing aid candidacy cannot be reliably predicted by objective factors such as age, maximum speech intelligibility, employment status, noise exposure, or social activity levels.
• Subjective outcome measures are critical in assessing the success of bilateral hearing aid fittings.
• Further research may be needed to identify novel predictors for successful bilateral hearing aid outcomes.