Psychosomatic status affects the relationship between subjective hearing difficulties and the results of audiometry.
OBJECTIVE
Subjective hearing difficulties are often used as a surrogate to audiometry in health check-up, although its effectiveness has not been tested in healthy workers. We conducted a study to test the usefulness of self-reported hearing difficulties for screening hearing impairment among healthy workers by comparing the results with those of audiometry.


METHODS
This was a cross-sectional observational study. A sample of 12,495 healthy workers in Japan without excess noise exposure was recruited at regular health check-up. Audiometry was conducted after self-administered questionnaire asking symptoms including hearing difficulties. The results were compared to those of audiometry as the gold standard.


RESULTS
Overall prevalence of hearing impairment was 4.6% among the population. Subjective hearing difficulties showed 0.21 of sensitivity, 0.95 of specificity, and 0.93 of accordance against audiometry. When limited to those with more than two psychosomatic symptoms, however, the corresponding numbers were 0.43, 0.85, and 0.83.


CONCLUSIONS
The assessment of subjective hearing difficulty may not be able to replace audiometry, but may be useful to detect psychosocial problems of hearing in the workplace.
Hashimoto
Hideki
H
Department of Hygiene and Public Health, Teikyo University School of Medicine, Kaga 2-11-1, Itabashi, Tokyo 173-8605, Japan. hhashimo@med.teikyo-u.ac.jp
Nomura
Kyoko
K
Yano
Eiji
E
D000293:Adolescent; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D002648:Child; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006311:Hearing Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D006320:Hearing Tests / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000379:methods; D009786:Occupational Health Services / Q000379:methods; D015995:Prevalence; D011602:Psychophysiologic Disorders / Q000150:complications*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity