The Influence of Hearing Aid Gain on Gap-Detection Thresholds for Children and Adults With Hearing Loss.
Marc A Brennan, Ryan W McCreery, Emily Buss and 1 others
PMID 29489468WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing aids fitted to the child version of the Desired Sensation Level program (DSL-C) helped adults with hearing loss detect gaps in noise as well as normal-hearing listeners.
This fitting method provided more gain than the adult version (DSL-A), restoring audibility better. Compression speed did not change results.
Key findings
01Adults with sensorineural hearing loss had significantly lower (better) stimulus-level thresholds for detecting gaps in noise when using the DSL-C prescriptive procedure compared to the DSL-A procedure.
02When aided with DSL-C, adults with hearing loss had gap-detection thresholds that were statistically indistinguishable from those of adults with normal hearing.
03Changing the compression speed of the hearing aid (fast vs. slow) did not significantly affect the ability to detect gaps in noise.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used a hearing-aid simulator, which provided more gain and no acoustic feedback compared to real wearable devices. Actual hearing aids might not achieve the same level of gap detection restoration. Maximum presentation levels were capped at 85 dB SPL, which prevented some participants from detecting the shortest gaps (3 ms). The link between improved gap detection in this lab task and better speech understanding in real life was not tested. Sample sizes for some subgroups (e.g., unaided adults with SNHL) were small.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (N.I.H.). No other conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that fitting a child's hearing aid to DSL-C in an adult patient will automatically improve their speech-in-noise scores. This study measured basic temporal resolution in a lab setting using a simulator, not functional communication with real hearing aids.