The WHAM Study: Socio-Emotional Well-being Effects of Hearing Aid Use and Mediation Through Improved Hearing Ability.

The study was not randomised, so people who adopted hearing aids may have differed from those who did not in ways not measured. Many participants had low symptom scores at baseline, which makes improvement hard to detect. The later samples were small: 75 participants for T1 to T2 and 35 for T2 to T3. Follow-up occurred only every 5 years, so short-term effects after hearing aid adoption may have been missed. Hearing aid adoption and use were self-reported, and ownership, inconsistent use and timing of first use may have been misclassified. Tinnitus severity was not measured, so the subgroup result for people without tinnitus cannot be applied to people with tinnitus of different severity. Some findings came from subgroup and interaction tests, so they should be treated as exploratory. Cognitive function, income and perceived stigma were not measured and may have affected the results.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that hearing aids improve emotional or social well-being for most adults with hearing impairment. The total sample associations were not significant, and the positive findings were limited to people without tinnitus for depression and people over 65 for total loneliness. This was an observational study, so it cannot show that hearing aid adoption caused those differences.