Listening-Related Fatigue in Adolescents With Prelingual Deafness and Device Experience.

Trends in hearing · 2026 · Cohort · SLP
Vijayalakshmi Easwar, Vicky W Zhang, Jason Gavrilis, Teresa Y C Ching, Brent Edwards

Adolescents with hearing loss and long-term device use had average fatigue scores in the normal range, but a meaningful subset scored above the clinical threshold. Perceived communication difficulty and anxiety/depression—not hearing level or device type—drove the differences.

Key findings

1

Group mean fatigue scores fell within 1 SD of the normative mean, but the proportion exceeding the clinical threshold (mean + 1 SD) was higher than the roughly 16% expected under a normal distribution, particularly among cochlear implant users.

2

Perceived listening difficulty was the strongest and most consistent predictor of fatigue across both parent- and self-report models; anxiety/depression was also significant. The gender and socioeconomic-status effects seen in the pooled model disappeared once these functional factors were included.

3

Parent and self-report fatigue showed only modest correlation: of 110 adolescents flagged as high-fatigue by either informant, 68 were flagged by both, 42 by self-report only, and 42 by parent-report only.

MethodologyResultsClinical Relevance

Single-blind randomized controlled trial. Sixty-four participants were randomized across two intervention arms and assessed at twelve weeks for the primary outcome…

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Summarised by AI from the abstract, not the full paper. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed