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CHAPTER FOUR Hearing Aids Positively Improve Your Quality of Life Sergei Kochkin, Ph.D.
The number one reason why people purchase their first hearing aids is they recognize their hearing has worsened. The second reason is pressure from family members who are negatively impacted by the individual’s hearing loss. As you know by now, hearing loss occurs gradually. By the time you recognize a need for hearing aids, your quality of life may have deteriorated unnecessarily. The average first-time hearing aid wearer is close to 70 years of age, despite the fact that the majority (65 percent) of people with hearing loss are below the age of 65; and nearly half of all people with hearing loss are below the age of 55. For the vast majority of individuals who have decided to wait to purchase hearing aids (78 percent of all people who admit to hearing loss), I suspect that while they may be aware their hearing loss has deteriorated, they delay hearing aid purchases under the excuses: “my hearing loss is not bad enough yet; I can get by without them; my hearing loss is mild.” A large number of people wait 15 years or more from the point when they first recognize they have a hearing loss to when they purchase their first hearing aids. This is a tragedy since they might not be aware of the impact this delayed decision has had on their life and the lives of their family, friends and associates. The literature presents a compelling story for the social, psychological, cognitive and health effects of hearing loss. Impaired hearing results in distorted or incomplete communication leading to greater isolation and withdrawal and therefore lower sensory input. In turn, the individual’s life space and social life becomes restricted. One would logically think that a constricted life would negatively impact the psychosocial well-being of people with hearing loss. . . Prior Experimental Evidence that Hearing Aids Improve Quality of Life
An effective human being is an effective communicator; optimized hearing is critical to effective communication. Modern hearing aids improve speech intelligibility and therefore communication. The benefits of hearing aids (audiologically defined as improved speech intelligibility) have been demonstrated in rigorous scientific research.1 It would seem that if one could improve speech intelligibility by correcting for impaired hearing, that one should observe improvements in the social, emotional, psychological and physical functioning of the person with the hearing loss. To my knowledge there have only been a few studies to date comparing hearing aid owners and non-owners with known hearing loss. The majority of studies had small sample sizes and in general tended to confine themselves to U.S. male veterans. Let me first share these results with you before describing the exciting findings of a very large U.S. study I conducted in collaboration with the National Council on Aging in 1999 (with publication in January 2000).2 Harless and McConnell3 demonstrated that 68 hearing aid wearers had significantly higher self-concepts compared to a matched group of individuals who did not wear hearing aids. Dye and Peak4 studied 58 male veterans pre and post hearing aid fitting and found significant improvement on memory tests. In the most rigorous controlled study to date, Mulrow, Aguilar and Endicott5 studied 122 male veterans and 72 patients from primary care clinics. Half were randomly chosen and fit with hearing aids while the other half were not. After four months compared to the control group, the researchers found significant improvements in the hearing aid wearers on emotional and social effects of hearing handicap, perceived communication difficulties, cognitive functioning, and depression. In addition, the same researchers in a follow-up study6 published in 1992 demonstrated that the quality of life changes were sustainable over at least a year. Bridges and Bentler7 determined in a study of 251 subjects comprised of normal hearing elderly individuals with hearing aids, and individuals with unaided hearing loss, that hearing aid wearers had less depression and higher quality of life scores compared to their unaided counterparts. Finally, in a pre-post study (that is the person was studied before and after a hearing aid fitting) with 20 subjects, Crandall8 demonstrated after three months of hearing aid use that functional health status improved significantly for hearing aid wearers. . . |
