Hearing-aid-Mayflower-Hearing

CAN HEARING AIDS REDUCE LISTENING FATIGUE?

This editorial discusses the clinical implications of an independent research study and does not represent the opinions of the original authors.

A patient recently told me that he wanted to put on his glasses so he could hear me better.  He was joking, but was correct in understanding that visual cues help facilitate speech understanding. When engaged in conversation, a listener uses many sources of information to supplement the auditory stimulus. Visual cues from lip-reading, gestures and expressions as well as situational cues, conversational context and the listener’s knowledge of grammar all help limit the possible interpretations of the message. Conditions that degrade the auditory stimulus, such as reverberation, background noise and hearing loss cause increased reliance on other cues in order for the listener to “fill in the blanks” and understand the spoken message. The use of these additional information sources amounts to an increased allocation of cognitive resources, which has also been referred to as increased “listening effort” (Downs, 1982; Hick & Tharpe, 2002; McCoy et al., 2005).

Research suggests that the increased cognitive effort required for hearing-impaired individuals to understand speech may lead to subjective reports of mental fatigue (Hetu et al., 1988; Ringdahl & Grimby, 2000; Kramer et al., 2006). This may be of particular concern to elderly people and those with cognitive, memory or other sensory deficits. The increased listening effort caused by hearing loss is associated with self-reports of stress, tension and fatigue (Copithorne 2006; Edwards 2007). In a study of factory workers, Hetu et al. (1988) reported that individuals with difficulty hearing at work needed increased attention, concentration and effort, leading to increased stress and fatigue. It is reasonable to conclude that listening effort as studied in the laboratory should be linked to subjective associations of hearing loss with mental fatigue, but the relationship is not clear. Dr. Hornsby points out that laboratory studies typically evaluate short-term changes in resource allocation as listening ease is manipulated in the experimental task. However, perceived mental fatigue is more likely to result from sustained listening demands over a longer period of time, e.g., a work day or social engagement lasting several hours (Hetu et al., 1988; Kramer et al., 2006).

The purpose of Dr. Hornsby’s study was to determine if hearing aids, with and without advanced features like directionality and noise reduction, reduce listening effort and subsequent susceptibility to mental fatigue. He also investigated the relationship between objective measures of speech discrimination and listening effort in the laboratory with subjective self-reports of mental fatigue.

Sixteen adult subjects participated in the study. All had bilateral, symmetrical, mild-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss. Twelve subjects were employed full-time and reported being communicatively active about 65% of the time during the day. The remaining subjects were not employed but reported being communicatively active about 61% of the day. Twelve subjects were bilateral hearing aid users and four subjects were non-users. Subjects were screened to rule out cognitive dysfunction. All participants were fitted with bilateral behind-the-ear hearing aids with slim tubes and dome ear tips.  Hearing aids were programmed in basic and advanced modes. In basic mode, the microphones were omnidirectional and all advanced features except feedback suppression were turned off. In advanced mode, the hearing aids were set to manufacturer’s defaults with automatically adaptive directionality, noise reduction, reverberation reduction and wind noise reduction. All subjects wore the study hearing aids for at least 1-2 weeks before the experimental sessions began.

For the objective measurements of listening effort, subjects completed a word recognition in noise task paired with an auditory word recall task and a measure of visual reaction time.  Subjects heard random sets of 8 to 12 monosyllabic words preceded by the carrier phrase, “Say the word…” They were asked to repeat the words aloud and the percentage of correct responses was scored. In addition, subjects were asked to remember the last 5 words of each list. The end of the list was indicated by the word “STOP” on a screen in front of the speaker. Subjects were instructed to press a button as quickly as possible when the visual prompt appeared. Because the lists varied from 8 to 12 items, subjects never knew when to expect the visual prompt.  To control for variability in motor function, visual reaction time was measured alone in a separate session, during which subjects were instructed to simply ignore the speech and noise.

Subjective ratings of listening effort and fatigue were obtained with a five-item scale, administered prior to the experimental sessions. Three questions were adapted from the Speech Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Questionnaire (SSQ: Gatehouse & Noble, 2004) and the remaining items were formulated specifically for the study. Questions were phrased to elicit responses related to that particular day (“Did you have to put in a lot of effort to hear what was being said in conversation today?”, “How mentally/physically drained are you right now?”).  The final two questions were administered before and after the dual-task session and measured changes in attention and fatigue due to participation in the experimental tasks.

The word recognition in noise test yielded significantly better results in both aided conditions than in the unaided condition, though there was no difference between the basic and advanced aided conditions. The differences between unaided and aided scores varied considerably, suggesting that listening effort for individual subjects varied across conditions.  Unaided word recall was significantly poorer than basic or advanced aided performance. There was a small, significant difference between the two aided conditions, with advanced settings outperforming basic settings. In follow-up planned comparison tests, the aided vs. unaided difference was maintained though there was not a significant difference between the two aided conditions.

The reaction time measurement also assessed listening effort or the cognitive resources required for the word recognition test.  Reaction times were analyzed according to listening condition as well as block, which compared the first three trials (initial block) to the last three trials (final block).  Increases in reaction time by block represented the effect of task-related fatigue.  Analysis by listening condition showed that unaided reaction times increased more than reaction times for the advanced aided condition but not the basic aided condition. In other words, subjects required more time to react to the visual stimulus in the unaided condition than they did in the advanced aided condition. There was no significant difference between the two aided conditions.  There was a significant main effect for block; reaction times increased over the duration of the task. There was no interaction between listening condition and block; changes in performance over time were consistent across unaided and aided conditions.

One purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of hearing aid use on mental fatigue. Interestingly, comparison of initial and final blocks indicated that word recognition scores increased about 1-2% over time but improvement over time did not vary across listening conditions. There was no decrease in performance on word recall over time, nor did changes in performance over time vary significantly across listening conditions.  But reaction time did increase over time for all conditions, indicating a shift in cognitive resources away from the reaction time task and toward the primary word recognition task. Though the effect of hearing aid use was not significant, a trend appeared suggesting that fewer aided listeners had increased reaction.

The questionnaires administered before the session probed perceived effort and fatigue throughout the day, whereas the questions administered before and after the task probed focus, attention and mental fatigue before and after the test session. In all listening conditions there was a significant increase in mental fatigue and difficulty maintaining attention after completion of the test session. A non-significant trend suggested some difference between unaided and aided conditions.

To identify other factors that may have contributed to variability, correlations for age, pure tone average, high frequency pure tone average, unaided word recognition score, SNR during testing, employment status and self-rated percentage of daily communicative activity were calculated with the subjective and objective measurements. None of the correlations were significant, indicating that none of these factors contributed substantially to the variability observed in the study.

Cognitive resource allocation is often studied with dual-task paradigms like the one used in this study. Decrements in performance on the secondary task indicate a shift in cognitive resources to the primary task. Presumably, factors that increase difficulty in the primary task will increase allocation of resources to the primary task.  In these experiments, the primary task was a word recognition test and the secondary tasks were word recall and reaction time measurements. Improved word recall and quicker reaction times in aided conditions indicate that the use of hearing aids made the primary word recognition task easier, allowing listeners to allocate more cognitive resources to the secondary tasks. Furthermore, reaction times increased less over time in aided conditions than in unaided conditions.  These findings specifically suggest that decreased listening effort with hearing aid use may have made listeners less susceptible to fatigue as the dual-task session progressed.

Though subjective reports in this study showed a general trend toward reduced listening effort and concentration in aided conditions, there was not a significant improvement with hearing aid use. This contrasts with previous work that has shown reductions in subjective listening effort with the use of hearing aids (Humes et al., 1999; Hallgren et al., 2005; Noble & Gatehouse, 2006). The author notes that auditory demands vary widely and that participants were asked to rate their effort and fatigue based on “today”, which didn’t assess perceptions of sustained listening effort over a longer period of time may not have detected subtle differences among subjects.  For instance, working in a quiet office environment may not highlight the benefit of hearing aids or the difference between an omnidirectional or directional microphone program, simply because the acoustic environment did not trigger the advanced features often enough. In contrast, working in a school or restaurant might show a more noticeable difference between unaided listening, basic amplification and advanced signal processing. Though subjects reported being communicatively active about the same proportion of the day, this inquiry didn’t account for sustained listening effort over long periods of time, or varying work and social environments. These differences would likely affect overall listening effort and fatigue, as well as the value of advanced hearing aid features.

Clinical observations support the notion that hearing aid use can reduce listening effort and fatigue.  Prior to hearing aid use, hearing-impaired patients often report feeling exhausted from trying to keep up with social interactions or workplace demands. After receiving hearing aids, patients commonly report being more engaged, more able to participate in conversation and less drained at the end of the day. Though previous reports have supported the value of amplification on reduced listening effort, Hornsby’s study is the first to provide experimental data for the potential ability of hearing aid use to reduce mental fatigue.

These findings have important implications for all hearing aid users, but may have particular importance for working individuals with hearing loss as well as elderly hearing impaired individuals.  It is important for any working person to maintain a high level of job performance and to establish their value at work. Individuals with hearing loss face additional challenges in this regard and often take pains to prove that their hearing loss is not adversely affecting their work.  Studies in workplace productivity underscore the importance of reducing distractions for maintaining focus, reducing stress and persisting at difficult tasks (Clements-Croome, 2000; Hua et al., 2011). Studies indicating that hearing aids reduce listening effort and fatigue, presumably by improving audibility and reducing the potential distraction of competing sounds, should provide additional encouragement for employed hearing-impaired individuals to pursue hearing aids.

 

References

Baldwin, C.L. & Ash, I.K. (2011). Impact of sensory acuity on auditory working memory span in young and older adults. Psychology of Aging 26, 85-91.

Bentler, R.A., Wu, Y., Kettel, J. (2008). Digital noise reduction: outcomes from laboratory and field studies. International Journal of Audiology 47, 447-460.

Clements-Croome, D. (2000). Creating the productive workplace. Publisher: London, E & FN Spon.

Copithorne, D. (2006). The fatigue factor: How I learned to love power naps, meditation and other tricks to cope with hearing-loss exhaustion. [Healthy Hearing Website, August 21, 2006].

Downs, M. (1982). Effects of hearing aid use on speech discrimination and listening effort. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 47, 189-193.

Edwards, B. (2007). The future of hearing aid technology. Trends in Amplification 11, 31-45.

Gatehouse, S. & Noble, W. (2004). The speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ). International Journal of Audiology 43, 85-99.

Hallgren, M., Larsby, B. & Lyxell, B. (2005). Speech understanding in quiet and noise, with and without hearing aids. International Journal of Audiology 44, 574-583.

Hetu, R., Riverin, L. & Lalande, N. (1988). Qualitative analysis of the handicap associated with occupational hearing loss. British Journal of Audiology 22, 251-264.

Hick, C.B. & Tharpe, A.M. (2002). Listening effort and fatigue in school-age children with and without hearing loss. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 45, 573-584.

Hua, Y., Loftness, V., Heerwagen, J. & Powell, K. (2011). Relationship between workplace spatial settings and occupant-perceived support for collaboration. Environment and Behavior 43, 807-826.

Humes, L.E., Christensen, L. & Thomas, T. (1999). A comparison of the aided performance and benefit provided by a linear and a two-channel wide dynamic range compression hearing aid. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 42, 65-79.

Kramer, S.E., Kapteyn, T.S. & Houtgast, T. (2006). Occupational performance: comparing normal-hearing and hearing-impaired employees using the Amsterdam Checklist for Hearing and Work. International Journal of Audiology 45, 503-512.

McCoy, S.L., Tun, P.A. & Cox, L.C. (2005). Hearing loss and perceptual effort: Downstream effects on older adults’ memory for speech. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A 58, 22-33.

Noble, W. & Gatehouse, S. (2006). Effects of bilateral versus unilateral hearing aid fitting on abilities measured by the SSQ. International Journal of Audiology 45, 172-181.

Picou, E.M., Ricketts, T.A. & Hornsby, B.W. (2011). Visual cues and listening effort: Individual variability. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 54, 1416-1430.

Picou, E.M., Ricketts, T.A. & Hornsby, B.W. (2013). The effect of individual variability on listening effort in unaided and aided conditions. Ear and Hearing (in press).

Ringdahl, A. & Grimby, A. (2000). Severe-profound hearing impairment and health related quality of life among post-lingual deafened Swedish adults. Scandinavian Audiology 29, 266-275

Sarampalis,  A., Kalluri, S. & Edwards, B. (2009). Objective measures of listening effort: Effects of background noise and noise reduction. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 52, 1230-1240.

Valente, M. & Mispagel, K. (2008) Unaided and aided performance with a directional open-fit hearing aid. International Journal of Audiology 47(6), 329-336.

Hearing Aids Mayflower Hearing in Yardley PA

DOES HEARING AID USE SLOW COGNITIVE DECLINE?

Deal, J., Sharrett, A., Albert, M., Coresh, J., Mosley, T., Knopman, D., Wruck, L. & Lin, F. (2015). Hearing impairment and cognitive decline: A pilot study conducted within the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study. American Journal of Epidemiology 181 (9), 680-690.

This editorial discusses the clinical implications of an independent research study and does not represent the opinions of the original authors.

Recent evidence has suggested that cognitive decline and hearing impairment may have more of a connection beyond simple co-occurrence in the older population. Certainly, as individuals age, they become more likely to exhibit reduced cognitive function and also more likely to have hearing loss. It has been proposed that hearing loss may be correlated with temporal lobe and whole brain atrophy (Lin & Albert, 2014; Peelle, et al., 2011; Lin et al., 2014).  Whether the two conditions are related to a shared underlying cause is not known, but a number of studies have indicated that hearing loss may put older individuals at higher risk of cognitive decline (Lin, 2011; Lin et al., 2011; Lin, et al., 2013). The effect of hearing loss on cognition may be mediated by social isolation and loneliness or increased listening effort required to process speech via an impaired peripheral auditory system (McCoy, et al., 2005; Tun, et al., 2009). Conversely, cognition affects every-day communication and recent research has shown that hearing aid users with reduced cognitive capacity may have poorer speech recognition ability in noise, be more susceptible to the effects of distortion and noise and may also take a longer time to adapt to new hearing aids (Lunner, 2003; Lunner et al., 2009; Ng et al., 2014)

The work of Deal and colleagues aimed to determine whether older individuals with hearing loss show poorer cognitive performance and experience a more rapid rate of cognitive decline than those with normal hearing. Subjects were recruited from a population originally recruited in 1987-1989 for a longitudinal study called Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC). Of the 15,792 ARIC subjects, 253 participated in this study on cognition and hearing, with a mean age of 76.9 years. Approximately 39% of the subjects were men, 61% were women.  At the 2013 session, 48% of the total participants reported ever smoking, 34% had diabetes and 71.9% had hypertension.  About 60% of the subjects had fewer than 12 years of education and 40% had more than 12 years of education.

The ARIC subjects completed a battery of neuropsychological tests on in three domains – memory, language and processing speed/attention – in 1990-1992 and again in 1996-1998.  Memory was tested with the Delayed Word Recall Test (DWRT; Knopman et al., 1989), the Incidental Learning Test (Kaplan et al., 1991) and the Logical Memory Tests I and II (Wechsler, 1945). Language was examined using the Word Fluency Test (Benton et al., 1994), Animals Naming Test (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1983) and the Boston Naming Test (Saxton et al., 2000). Processing speed and attention were assessed with the Digit Symbol Substitution and Digit Span Backwards Tests (Wechsler, 1981) and Trail Making Tests I and II (Spreen & Strauss, 1991; Reitan, 1958). For the purpose of the present study, these neuropsychological tests were administered again in 2013.

Pure tone air conduction thresholds were obtained for all 2013participants and they were categorized according to degree of loss indicated by the pure tone average (PTA) in the better ear: normal (lower than 25dB), mild (26-40dB), moderate/severe (greater than 40dB).  Only 5 individuals had PTAs greater than 70dB, so these individuals were included in the moderate/severe group. Of the total population, 34% had moderate/severe hearing loss, 37% had mild hearing loss and 29% had normal hearing. Hearing aid users made up approximately 20% of the total subject population. Hearing aid use was loosely defined as the self-reported use of a hearing aid in either or both ears during the month prior to the experimental session.  The duration of hearing aid use ranged from less than 1 year to 48 years, with most aided participants reporting hearing aid use for a period of 3 to 7 years.

All of the groups showed a decline in cognitive performance over the 20 years of the study, but the hearing loss groups declined faster than the normal hearing group. The subjects with moderate/severe hearing loss were slightly older and slightly more likely to be male and to have hypertension. However, after correcting for these variables, the subjects with moderate/severe hearing loss still declined significantly faster than the normal hearing group.

Approximately 51% of the subjects with moderate/severe hearing loss wore hearing aids.  The individuals who did not wear hearing aids had significantly poorer performance on the cognitive tests and demonstrated a significantly faster rate of decline compared to those in the moderate/severe group who did wear hearing aids. The rate of 20-year memory decline for the unaided individuals in this group was twice the average rate of decline reported in national studies of cognitive change in older adults (Salthouse, 2010; Hayden et al., 2011).  In comparison, the hearing aid users in this study with moderate/severe hearing loss showed a rate of cognitive decline that was only slightly higher than the rate for subjects with normal hearing.

The authors point out that because hearing was not assessed at earlier experimental sessions, they cannot rule out the possibility that cognitive decline had a causative effect on the measured hearing loss. However, this is unlikely because they corrected for co-occurring diseases and conditions in their analysis. Furthermore, conditions affecting cognition are not known to have any effect on the peripheral auditory system and cognitive deficits were not expected to have influenced the validity of the audiometric test results.

Many have proposed that hearing loss may increase risk of cognitive decline, via increased social isolation, increased perceptual effort and changes in brain volume. Unaided hearing loss is known to increase the risk of social isolation, which in turn has been associated with increases in blood pressure and corticosteroid levels, which could in turn affect brain structure (Mick et al., 2014; Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010). Similarly, several studies have indicated that hearing loss increased effortful listening, thereby increasing the cognitive demands required to process speech (Rabbitt, 1968; Tun et al., 2009; McCoy et al., 2005).

The outcomes of this study are in agreement with other reports in which hearing impaired individuals demonstrated poorer performance on cognitive tests and faster rates of cognitive decline (Lin, 2011; Lin et al., 2011; Lin, et al., 2013). Other reports also indicate a relationship between hearing loss and subsequent dementia over years of follow-up evaluations (Gallacher et al., 2012; Lin et al., 2011).  The current outcome that hearing aid use had a mitigating effect on cognitive performance and rate of decline is fascinating and supports the need for further investigation on the relationship between cognition and hearing loss.

Though this is an emerging area of study, the results reported here offer strong support for the proposal that the risk of cognitive decline by hearing loss may be reduced, at least partially, by the correction of peripheral hearing loss with hearing aids.  This underscores the importance of amplification for older individuals and clinicians should be prepared to counsel their patients that hearing aids are an effective way to improve communication, decrease social isolation and may slow or decrease the risk of cognitive decline.However, clinicians should be cautious not to suggest that hearing aids will prevent cognitive decline. Although the authors are careful not to claim a causal relationship between hearing loss and cognitive decline, it is clear that the two conditions are related and because hearing loss is easily treatable it may be one of the few ways in which individuals can proactively manage their risk of cognitive decline.

References

Benton, A., Hamsher, K., & Sivan, A. (1994). Multilingual Aphasia Examination 3rd ed. Iowa City, IA: AJA Associates.

Deal, J., Sharrett, A., Albert, M., Coresh, J., Mosley, T., Knopman, D., Wruck, L. & Lin, F. (2015). Hearing impairment and cognitive decline: A pilot study conducted within the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study. American Journal of Epidemiology 181 (9), 680-690.

Gallacher, J., Ilubaera, V. & Ben-Shlomo, Y. (2012). Auditory threshold, phonologic demand and incident dementia. Neurology 79(15), 1583-1590.

Goodglass, H. & Kaplan, E. (1983). The Assessment of Aphasia and Related Disorders 2nd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Febiger: 102, 31.

Hawkley, L. & Cacioppo, J. (2010).  Loneliness matters: a theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 40(2), 218-227.

Hayden, K., Reed, B. & Manly, M. (2011). Cognitive decline in the elderly: an analysis of population heterogeneity. Age and Aging 40(6), 684-689.

Kaplan, E., Fein, D. & Morris, R. (1991). WAIS as a Neuropsychological Instrument. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.

Knopman, D. & Ryberg, S. (1989). A verbal memory test with high predictive accuracy for dementia of the Alzheimer type. Archives of Neurology 46(2), 141-145.

Lin, F.  (2011). Hearing loss and cognition among older adults in the United States. The Journals of Gerontology A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences 66 (10), 1131-1136.

Lin, F. & Albert, M. (2014). Hearing loss and dementia – who is listening? Aging and Mental Health 18(6), 671-673.

Lin, F., Ferrucci, L. & Metter, E. (2011). Hearing loss and cognition in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Neuropsychology 25(6), 763-770.

Lin, F., Yaffe, K., & Xia, J. (2013). Hearing loss and cognitive decline in older adults. Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine 173 (4), 293-299.

Lunner, T. (2003). Cognitive function in relation to hearing aid use. International Journal of Audiology 42, (Suppl. 1), S49-S58.

Lunner, T., Rudner, M. & Ronnberg, J. (2009). Cognition and hearing aids. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 50, 395-403.

McCoy, S.L., Tun, P.A. & Cox, L.C. (2005). Hearing loss and perceptual effort: downstream effects on older adults’ memory for speech. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 58, 22-33.

Mick, P., Kawachi, I. & Lin, F. (2014). The association between hearing loss and social isolation in older adults. Otolaryngology Head Neck Surgery 150(3), 378-384.

Ng, E.H.N., Classon, E., Larsby, B., Arlinger, S., Lunner, T., Rudner, M., Ronnberg, J. (2014). Dynamic relation between working memory capacity and speech recognition in noise during the first six months of hearing aid use. Trends in Hearing 18, 1-10.

Peelle, J., Troiani, V. & Grossman, M. (2011). Hearing loss in older adults affects neural systems supporting speech comprehension. Journal of Neuroscience 31(35), 12638-12643.

Rabbitt, P. (1968). Channel-capacity, intelligibility and immediate memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20(3), 241-248.

Reitan, R. (1958). Validity of the Trail Making Test as an indicator of organic brain damage. Perceptual and Motor Skills 8, 271-276.

Salthouse, T. (2010). Major Issues in Cognitive Aging. Vol. 49, New York, NY: Oxford University Press: 246.

Saxton, J., Rafcliff, G. & Munro, C. (2000).  Normative data on the Boston Naming Test and two equivalent 30-item short forms. Clinical Neuropsychology 14(4), 526-534.

Spreen, O. & Strauss, E. (1991). A Compendium of Neuropsychological Tests: Administration, Norms and Commentary. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Tun, P., McCoy, S. & Wingfield, A. (2009). Aging, hearing acuity and the attentional costs of effortful listening. Psychology and Aging 24(3), 761-766.

Wechsler, D. (1945). A standardized memory scale for clinical use. Journal of Psychology 19(1), 87-95.

Wechsler, D. (1981). Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Revised. New York, NY: The Psychological Corporation.

HEARING AIDS ALONE CAN BE ADJUSTED TO HELP WITH TINNITUS RELIEF

This editorial discusses the clinical implications of an independent research study and does not represent the opinions of the original authors.

The American Tinnitus Association (ATA) reports that approximately 50 million people in the United States experience some degree of tinnitus.About one third of tinnitus sufferers consider it severe enough to seek medical attention. Fortunately only a small proportion of tinnitus sufferers experience symptoms that are debilitating enough that they feel they cannot function normally. But even if it does not cause debilitating symptoms, for many tinnitus still causes a number of disruptive effects such as sleep interference, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, frustration and depression  (Tyler & Baker, 1983; Stouffer & Tyler, 1990; Axelsson, 1992; Meikle 1992; Dobie, 2004).

Therapeutic treatments for tinnitus include the use of tinnitus maskers, tinnitus retraining therapy, biofeedback and counseling . Though these methods provide relief for many the tendency for tinnitus to co-occur with sensorineural hearing loss (Hoffman & Reed, 2004) leads the majority of individuals to attempt management of tinnitus with the use of hearing aids alone (Henry, et al., 2005; Kochkin & Tyler, 2008; Shekhawat et al., 2013).  There are a number of benefits that hearing aids may offer for individuals with tinnitus:  audiological counseling during the fitting process may provide the individual with a better understanding of hearing loss and tinnitus (Searchfield et al., 2010); hearing aids may reduce the stress related to struggling to hear and understand; amplification of environmental sound may reduce perceived loudness of tinnitus (Tyler, 2008).

Prescriptive hearing aid fitting procedures are designed to improve audibility and assist hearing loss rather than address tinnitus concerns. Yet the majority of studies show that hearing aids alone can be useful for tinnitus management (Shekhawat et al., 2013). The Better Hearing Institute reports that approximately 28% of hearing aid users achieve moderate to substantial tinnitus relief with hearing aid use (Tyler, 2008). Approximately 66% of these individuals said their hearing aids offered tinnitus relief most or all the time and 29% reported that their hearing aids relieved their tinnitus all the time. However, little is known about how hearing aids should be adjusted to optimize this apparent relief from tinnitus. In a study comparing DSL I/O v4.0 and NAL-NL1, Wise (2003) found that low compression kneepoints in the DSL formula reduced tinnitus awareness for 80% of subjects, but these settings also made environmental sounds more annoying. Conversely, they had higher word recognition scores with NAL-NL1 but did not receive equal tinnitus reduction. The proposed explanation for this was the increased low-intensity, low-frequency gain of the DSL I/O formula versus the increased high frequency emphasis of NAL-NL1. Based on these findings, the author suggested the use of separate programs for regular use and for tinnitus relief.

Shekhawat and his colleagues began to address the issue of prescriptive hearing aid fitting for tinnitus by studying how output characteristics should be tailored to meet the needs of hearing aid users with tinnitus.  Specifically, they examined how modifying the high frequency characteristics of the DSL v5 (Scollie et al., 2005) prescription would affect subjects’ short term tinnitus perception.  Speech files with variable high frequency cut-offs and gain settings were designed and presented to subjects in matched pairs to arrive at the most favorable configuration for tinnitus relief.

Twenty-five participants mild to moderate high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss were recruited for participation. None of the participants had used hearing aids before but all indicated interest in trying hearing aids to alleviate their tinnitus.  All subjects had experienced chronic, bothersome tinnitus for at least two years and the average perception of tinnitus loudness was 62.6 on a scale from 1-100, where 1 is very faint and 100 is very loud. Subjects had a mean Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI; Meikle et al., 2012) score of 39.30. Six participants reported unilateral tinnitus localized to the left side, 15 had bilateral tinnitus and 4 reported tinnitus that localized to the center of the head, which is likely to be present bilaterally though not necessarily symmetrical.  The majority (40%) of the subjects reported their tinnitus quality as tonal, whereas 28% described it as noise, 20% as crickets and 12% as a combination of sound qualities. Tinnitus pitch matching was conducted using pairs of tones in which subjects were repeatedly asked to indicate which of the tones more closely matched the pitch of their tinnitus. The average matched tinnitus pitch was 7.892kHz with a range from 800Hz to 14.5kHz. When asked to describe the pitch of their tinnitus, most subjects defined it as “very high pitched”, some said “high pitched” and some said “medium pitched”.

There were 13 speech files, based on sentences spoken by a female talker, with variable high frequency characteristics. There were three cut-off frequencies (2, 4 and 6kHz) and four high frequency gain settings (+6, +3, -3 and -6dB). Stimuli were presented via a master hearing aid with settings programmed to match DSL I/O v5.0 prescriptive targets for each subject’s hearing loss.  Pairs of sentences were presented in a round robin tournament procedure  and subjects were asked to choose which one interfered most with their tinnitus and made it less audible. A computer program tabulated the number of “wins” for each sentence and collapsed the information across subjects to determine a “winner”, or the sentence that was most effective at reducing tinnitus audibility.  Real-ear measures were used to compare DSL v5 prescribed settings with the characteristics of the winning sentence and outputs were recorded from 250Hz to 6000Hz.

The most preferred output for interfering with tinnitus perception was a 6dB reduction at 2kHz, which was chosen by 26.47% of the participants.  A 6dB reduction at 4kHz was preferred by 14.74% of the subjects, followed by a 3dB reduction at 2kHz, which was preferred by 11.76%.  There were no significant differences between the preferences for any of these settings.

They found that when tinnitus pitch was lower than 4kHz, the preferred setting had lower output than DSL v5 across the frequency range. The difference was small (1-3dB) and became smaller as tinnitus pitch increased. When tinnitus pitch was between 4-8kHz, subjects preferred slightly less output than DSL v5 for high frequencies and slightly more output for low frequencies, though these differences were minimal as well. When tinnitus pitch was higher than 8kHz, participants preferred output that was slightly greater than DSL v5 at three frequencies: 750Hz, 1kHz and 6kHz. From these results a trend emerged: as tinnitus pitch increased, preferred output became lower than DSL v5 though the differences were not statistically significant.

Few studies investigating the use of hearing aids for tinnitus management have considered the perceived pitch of the tinnitus or the prescriptive method of the hearing aids (Shekhawat et al., 2013). The results of this study suggest that DSL v5 could be an effective prescriptive formula for hearing aids used in a tinnitus treatment plan, though the pitch of the individual’s tinnitus might affect the optimal output settings. In general, they found that the higher the tinnitus pitch, the more the preferred output matched with DSL I.O v5.0 targets. This study agrees with an earlier report by Wise (2003) in which subjects preferred DSL v5 over NAL-NL1 for interfering with and reducing tinnitus. It is unknown how NAL-NL2 targets would fare in a similar comparison, though the NAL-NL2 formula may provide more tinnitus relief than its predecessor because it tends to prescribe slightly higher gain for low frequencies and lower compression ratios which could potentially provide more of a masking effect from environmental sounds. The NAL-NL2 formula should be studied as it pertains to tinnitus management, perhaps along with consideration of other factors including degree of loss, gender and prior experience with hearing aids, since these affect the targets prescribed by the updated formula (Keidser & Dillon, 2006; Keidser et al., 2008). The subjects in the present study had similar degrees of loss and all lacked prior experience with amplification; the NAL-NL2 formula takes these factors into consideration, prescribing slightly different gain based on degree of loss or for those who have used hearing aids before.

The authors recommend offering separate hearing aid programs for use when the listener desires tinnitus relief. Most fitting formulae are designed to optimize speech intelligibility and audibility, and based on previous reports, an individual might prefer one formula when speech understanding and communication is their top priority, and may prefer another, used with or without an added noise masker, when their tinnitus is bothering them.

They also propose that tinnitus pitch matching should be considered when programming hearing aids, though there is often quite a bit of variability in results and testing needs to be repeated several times to increase reliability.  Still, their study agrees with prior work in suggesting that the pitch of the tinnitus affects how likely hearing aids are to reduce it and whether output adjustments can impact how effective the hearing aids are to this end. Schaette (2010) found that individuals with tinnitus pitch lower than 6kHz showed more reduction of tinnitus with hearing aid use than did subjects whose pitch was higher than 6kHz. This makes sense because of the typical bandwidth of hearing aids, in which most gain is delivered below this frequency range. Not surprisingly, another study reported that hearing aids were most effective at reducing tinnitus when the pitch of the tinnitus was within the frequency response range of the hearing aids (McNeil et al., 2012).  Though incorporating tinnitus pitch matching into a clinical protocol might seem daunting or time consuming, it is probably possible to use an informal bracketing procedure, similar to one used for MCLs, to get an idea of the individual’s tinnitus pitch range. Testing can be repeated at subsequent visits to eventually arrive at a more reliable estimate.  If pitch matching measures are not possible, clinicians can question the patient about their perceived tinnitus pitch range and, with reference the current study, adjust outputs in the 2kHz to 4kHz range to determine if the individual experiences improvement in tinnitus relief.

Proposed are a series of considerations for fitting hearing instruments on tinnitus sufferers and for employing dedicated tinnitus programs:

– noise reduction should be disabled;

– fixed activation of omnidirectional microphones introduce more environmental noise;

– in contrast to the previous recommendation, full-time activation of directional microphones will increase the hearing aid noise floor;

– lower compression knee points increase amplification for softer sounds;

– expansion should be turned off to increase amplification of low-level background sound;

– efforts should be made to  minimize occlusion, which can emphasize the perception of tinnitus;

– ensuring physical comfort of the devices can minimize the user’s general awareness of their ears and the hearing aids, potentially reducing their attention to the tinnitus as well (Sheldrake & Jastreboff, 2004; Searchfield, 2006);

– user controls are important as they allow access to alternate hearing aid programs and sound therapy options.

Dr. Shekhawat and his colleagues also underscore the importance of counseling tinnitus sufferers who choose hearing aids. Clinicians need to ensure that these patients have realistic expectations about the potential benefits of hearing aids and that they know the devices will not cure their tinnitus. Follow-up care is especially important to determine if adjustments or further training is necessary to improve the performance of the aids for all of their intended purposes.

Currently, little is known about how to optimize hearing aid settings for tinnitus relief and there are no prescriptive recommendations targeted specifically for tinnitus sufferers. Shekhawat and his colleagues propose that the DSL v5 formula may be an appropriate starting point for these individuals, as their basic program and/or in an alternate program designated for use when their tinnitus is particularly bothersome.  Most importantly, however, are the observations that intentional manipulation of parameters common to most hearing aid fittings may increase likelihood of tinnitus relief with hearing aid use. Further investigation into the optimization of these fitting parameters may reveal a prescriptive combination that audiologists can leverage to benefit individuals with hearing loss who also seek relief from the stress and annoyance of tinnitus.

 

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