A Systematic Review of the Effect of Hearing Aids on Static and Dynamic Balance in Adults with Hearing Impairment.

Nine of the ten studies tested the same people with and without their aids and had no separate control group, so a change could be caused by the aids or simply by being tested a second time. All studies were rated fair or poor quality on a standard checklist, and none reported whether it had enough participants to detect a difference. Most participants had no balance complaints, and in eight of ten studies the balance tests were at risk of a ceiling effect, so the studies may not have had room to show improvement and say little about people who actually have balance problems. Almost nothing was reported about the hearing aids themselves: eight of ten studies gave no detail on type, fitting or settings, and no study reported how much people used them day to day. The hearing loss of participants was described inconsistently, from type and degree being absent to simply present or absent, which makes the studies hard to compare. The external sound used varied from none at all to white noise to multi-talker babble, which changes the task participants were doing. Samples were small (9 to 47 people), all testing was done in a laboratory rather than in real-world conditions, and studies used different equipment and different balance measures. The review itself was limited to English-language papers in peer-reviewed journals, and the authors found only ten studies to include.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The work was funded by Sonova AG, a hearing aid manufacturer, through PhD scholarships.

Do not read this as evidence that fitting hearing aids prevents falls. The improvements were in laboratory measures of standing still, usually only while sound was played in the room, and most participants had no balance problem to begin with. The studies that measured walking and moving balance found no benefit at all, and every study was rated only fair or poor quality.