Listening Effort in Quiet and Noisy Environments in the Daily Life of Adults With Hearing Aids: An Extended Version of the Effort Assessment Scale (EEAS).

The study was cross-sectional and did not measure effort before hearing-aid fitting, so changes over time cannot be treated as proven effects of hearing aids. There was no concurrent objective speech-in-noise measure, so the questionnaire result cannot be compared directly with measured listening performance. The normal-hearing group was young (average 24, maximum 35), while hearing-aid users averaged 74, so group differences cannot be separated from age and hearing status. Different analyses used different subsets of hearing-aid users (454 for internal structure, 366 for correlations, and 434 for regression), so not every result rests on the full 481. The 0-to-10 visual analog scale was treated as linear, but the authors note that equal intervals may not be true for every patient. The questionnaire was a French-language version with cultural adaptation, which may limit generalizability to other languages and hearing-care settings.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The work was funded by Region Auvergne Rhône-Alpes under Pack ambition recherche 2017-2022, with support from LABEX CELYA and the Association Nationale de la Recherche et de la Technologie.

Do not conclude that hearing aids make listening effort worse over time. The study had no before-and-after fitting data; recent users showed decreasing noisy effort, while long-term users showed increasing noisy effort, and the cross-sectional design cannot separate experience from other changes.