Health and disability assessment in individuals with hearing loss: a longitudinal study using WHODAS 2.0.
Karen Melissa Gonzaga Dos Santos, Rogéria Cristina Toscano Dias, Jade Louise Alves Macedo Padilha Silva and 1 others
15 adults with hearing loss reported less difficulty in communication, self-care, daily tasks, and social life after a year of hearing-aid use.
No control group, so some of the gain may reflect expectation or natural change. Small, single-site study.
Key findings
1The overall WHODAS 2.0 disability score (0 = no difficulty, 4 = extreme difficulty) fell from 1.87 to 1.21 after one year of regular hearing-aid use (p = 0.014). The authors describe this as a 12% functional improvement.
2Four of six domains improved significantly — cognition, self-care, work/household activities, and social participation — while mobility and getting along showed smaller changes that did not reach significance.
3The number of participants classified as having mild disability rose from 7 to 11 and no one was classified as severe at follow-up, but this shift in disability category did not reach the study's significance threshold (p = 0.083).
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What it does not show
Only 15 participants, all from one rural clinic in Brazil, recruited by convenience rather than random sampling. No control or comparison group: participants were measured before and after hearing-aid use, so natural improvement, placebo effect, or regression to the mean cannot be separated from the device effect. No randomisation and no blinding; the same audiologists administered the questionnaire at both time points. Gender imbalance (11 men, 4 women) reflects the clinic's patient mix rather than a deliberate design choice. Income and socioeconomic data were not collected, so the authors could not examine whether disability perception differed across social groups. The shift in disability category (mild increasing, severe disappearing) did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.083), which the authors attribute to the small sample. Single-group, single-site design limits generalisability to other populations, hearing-aid types, or clinical settings.
Declared interests
No funding source and no conflicts of interest were declared.
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