An elderly man came in to the clinic hoping to buy a hearing aid. Otoscopy, tympanometry, puretone audiometry, and speech tests were performed. These tests revealed a high-frequency sloping loss. His results were opposite of what was expected from listening to his speech. He spoke softly and very slowly which led me to believe that there was some conductive component. However, during the case history, he said that he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. Frequency specific loudness levels were also tested.
His speech discrimination scores were both very poor so two hearing aids were recommended. However, the patient did not want to buy two due to cost issues. For a monaural fitting, the ear with the better speech discrimination score was chosen for a hearing aid. The patient expressed hearing problems at church and on the telephone. After discussing with the patient two hearing aid options, we chose the Widex Diva 9 Me since it has a telecoil.
Since two hearing aids were recommended, I wanted to include an article on sound deprivation of an unaided ear. This article suggests that if an ear goes unaided, the patient's speech recognition thresholds will decrease with time. The study included 19 monaurally aided adults, 28 binaurally aided adults, and and 19 control adults. W-22 CID suprathreshold speech-recognition test, nonsense syllable test, and speech-perception-in-noise test were performed.
http://web.ebscohost.com.www.libproxy.wvu.edu/ehost/detail?vid=1&hid=8&sid=d560badc-20e0-4800-ba60-b0bf9b61064a%40SRCSM2
Silman S; Silverman CA; Emmer MB; Gelfand SA. (1993). Effects of prolonged lack of amplification on speech-recognition performance: preliminary findings. Journal Of Rehabilitation Research And Development, Vol. 30 (3), pp. 326-32.
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1 comment:
Katie,
It is so sad that so many people have to make the choice to only buy one aid even when they need too. I think this article is very interesting. I wonder if by showing articles like this to our clients if they would re-consider purchasing their second aid...even if at a later time. Thanks for the information!
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