Predictors of auditory performance in hearing-aid users: The role of cognitive function and auditory lifestyle (A)

Within clinical audiology, it is often observed that patients who are expected to perform the same differ in auditory performance. Hearing-aid users may be dissatisfied with their instruments while they score satisfactorily in objective tests, or they may be satisfied with their instruments while no objective benefit can be measured.

It has been suggested that lack of agreement between various hearing-aid outcome components can be explained by individual differences in cognitive function and auditory lifestyle. We measured speech identification, self-report outcome, spectral and temporal resolution of hearing, cognitive skills, and auditory lifestyle in 25 new hearing-aid users.

The purpose was to assess the predictive power of the nonauditory measures while looking at the relationships between measures from various auditory-performance domains. The results showed that only moderate correlation exists between objective and subjective hearing-aid outcome. Different self-report outcome measures showed a different amount of correlation with objective auditory performance.

Cognitive skills were found to play a role in explaining speech performance and spectral and temporal abilities, and auditory lifestyle was correlated with self-report outcome. However, overall the predictive leverage of the various measures was moderate, with single predictors explaining only up to 19 percent of the variance in the auditory-performance measures. a)Now at CNBH, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, UK.