Benefits of Hearing Aids on the Quality of Life in Adolescents with Hearing Loss

During the recent years, a great progress has been made in identifying hearing loss in adolescents and prompt intervention. The effectiveness of rehabilitation approaches can be verified in various aspects including reducing the disability, acceptance, usefulness and satisfaction. The aim of the present study was to investigate the beneficial relationship between hearing aids and the quality of life in impaired adolescents.

In the present descriptive-analytical study, adolescents aged 12 to 18 with severe sensor-neural hearing loss, who had used smart digital hearing aid a minimum of one year, were targeted. Accordingly, a total of 61 patients were selected for the investigation. To collect data, two questionnaires were used: The Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB) has 24 items and includes four subsets of optimal conditions, reverberation, and background noise and sound persecutors, and Quality of Life Questionnaire of hearing loss for adolescents with 38 questions divided into three parts: physical, emotional, and socio-emotional. Data were analyzed in EXCEL and SPSS 16 software. One-sample t-test, paired t, Spearman correlation coefficient, independent t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used along with the corresponding post hoc test.

In the average score of all four sub-categories and the average rating of total scores before and after using hearing aids, there was a significant difference (P=0/0005). In terms of the quality of life, the emotional-excitement, physical, and social classifications had the highest average, respectively. No significant relationship was then observed between the effectiveness of hearing aids and quality of life in hearing-impaired adolescents in Tehran (P=0/5).

The results indicated that what means as quality of life for adolescents is not only influenced by the effectiveness of hearing aid. Also, the results showed that hearing aids is effective in reducing disability caused by hearing impairment.