Associations Between Pre-Fitting Factors and 2-Year Hearing Aid Use Persistence, Derived From Health Records and Post-Fitting Battery Order Data of 284,175 US Veterans.
Graham Naylor, Lauren K Dillard, Oliver Zobay and 1 others
PMID 40518564WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing aid persistence depends on more than hearing loss.
Experienced users persisted more than new users. Dementia, mental health conditions, and multimorbidity reduced persistence. Race and partnership status also mattered. These pre-fitting factors are not modifiable but can flag patients needing extra support.
Key findings
01New hearing aid recipients were much less likely to remain persistent users than patients who were already experienced users.
02Persistence reduces strongly with prevalent dementia, but mild cognitive impairment shows no effect.
03The presence of mental health conditions other than dementia and MCI has a considerable effect on persistence, reducing it by about ten percentage points.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used routine clinical data, which may contain coding errors, though these likely underestimate effects. The sample was 98.4% male and drawn from the VA system, limiting generalizability to the general population. Only pre-fitting factors were examined; post-fitting variables like follow-up care were not included. The model was a main-effects-only logistic regression, so it could not capture complex interactions between variables.
Declared interests
Funding was provided by the United States VA Office of Rehabilitation Research Development and Translation Services, the Medical Research Council, the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre, and the National Institutes of Health. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret these associations as causal. The study identifies factors linked to persistence but does not prove that changing these factors will change outcomes. Additionally, because the sample was predominantly male veterans, these specific risk profiles may not apply directly to female or non-veteran populations.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →