Candidacy for bilateral hearing aids: a retrospective multicenter study.
OBJECTIVE
The goal of this study was to find factors for refining candidacy criteria for bilateral hearing aid fittings. Clinical files of 1,000 consecutive hearing aid fittings were analyzed.


METHODS
Case history, audiometric, and rehabilitation data were collected from clinical files, and an extensive questionnaire on long-term outcome measures was conducted. After at least 2 years of hearing aid use, 505 questionnaires were returned. In order to compare differences in benefits between unilateral and bilateral fittings, two subgroups were composed in which most relevant variables (age, degree of hearing loss, and audiometric asymmetry) were matched for unilateral fittings (n=212) and bilateral fittings (n=477).


RESULTS
The bilateral group had significantly higher benefit scores than the unilateral group for detection, speech intelligibility in reverberation, and localization, but poorer scores for comfort of loud sounds. The benefit of bilateral hearing aids was not significantly related to the level of technology of the hearing aids.


CONCLUSIONS
The analysis of the relation between objective parameters and the subjective outcome measures showed that candidacy for a successful bilateral fitting could not be predicted from age, maximum speech intelligibility, employment, exposure to background noise, or social activities.
Boymans
Monique
M
Academic Medical Center, Department of Clinical and Experimental Audiology, Meibergdreef 9, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, the Netherlands. m.boymans@amc.nl
Goverts
S Theo
ST
Kramer
Sophia E
SE
Festen
Joost M
JM
Dreschler
Wouter A
WA
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D009790:Occupations; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012919:Social Behavior; D013017:Sound Localization; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D055815:Young Adult