Fitting a Hearing Aid on the Better Ear, Worse Ear, or Both: Associations of Hearing-aid Fitting Laterality with Outcomes in a Large Sample of US Veterans.

ABSTRACT: Longitudinal electronic health records from a large sample of new hearing-aid (HA) recipients in the US Veterans Affairs healthcare system were used to evaluate associations of fitting laterality with long-term HA use persistence as measured by battery order records, as well as with short-term HA use and satisfaction as assessed using the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids (IOI-HA), completed within 180 days of HA fitting. The large size of our dataset allowed us to address two aspects of fitting laterality that have not received much attention, namely the degree of hearing asymmetry and the question of which ear to fit if fitting unilaterally. The key findings were that long-term HA use persistence was considerably lower for unilateral fittings for symmetric hearing loss (HL

SUBMITTER: Zobay O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10467180 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature