The Revised Hearing Handicap Inventory and Screening Tool Based on Psychometric Reevaluation of the Hearing Handicap Inventories for the Elderly and Adults.
Christy Cassarly, Lois J Matthews, Annie N Simpson and 1 others
PMID 31124792WHAT IT FOUND
The HHIE and HHIA emotional and social subscales did not measure separate problems.
The items measure one overall hearing handicap score. New 18-item RHHI and 10-item RHHI-S work for all adults; score 6 or higher may indicate hearing impairment and need for hearing testing.
Key findings
01The emotional and social subscales of the HHIE and HHIA did not measure separate problems; the items formed one hearing handicap scale.
02The revised 18-item RHHI and 10-item RHHI-S were built from items common to both original scales and are suitable for adults of all ages.
03A total score of 6 or higher detected hearing impairment with 73.2% sensitivity and 73.8% specificity on the RHHI, and with 70.3% sensitivity and 78.8% specificity on the RHHI-S.
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 sample was made up of volunteers in good general health from one metropolitan area, so the revised tools and cutoff scores may not work the same way in other clinical populations. Participants were excluded if they had conductive hearing loss, active ear disease, or significant cognitive decline, so the results may not apply to patients with those problems. Some participants completed the age-specific questionnaire that did not match their age and were excluded from the original-scale analysis. The cutoff scores were obtained from the same data set used to evaluate the scales, and the authors said further research is needed to test them in other populations.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article metadata notes U.S. Government, non-PHS research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat a score of 6 or higher as proof of hearing loss. It was a screening cutoff from one research cohort, with 73.2% sensitivity and 73.8% specificity for the 18-item scale and 70.3% sensitivity and 78.8% specificity for the 10-item screening scale, so hearing testing is still needed.