노인성 난청의 보청기 효과

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

As the span of human life is lengthened, it is getting more important to understand and treat appropriately geriatrics with hearing losses and fit them with hearing aids. To explore the effects of hearing aids in presbycusis, the changes of the hearing threshold, the word recognition ability and the hearing handicap index before and after fitting hearing aids were examined for twenty-nine subjects aged 65 or greater. Results showed that after fitting the appropriate hearing aids, most of them increased the speech recognition ability and decreased the hearing threshold and the hearing handicap index. However, two wearers rejected the use of hearing aids within a month, because they had felt more comfortable without the aids although the audiometric test results demonstrated the improvement in communication ability with the aids. These results suggest that in general, hearing aids can help geriatrics with hearing losses understand speech better and decrease the degree of hearing handicap ; however, psychosocial aspects as well as audiometric test results be always considered for successful hearing aid fitting in geriatric population. More study should focus on developing the systematic tools to measure the hearing aid benefit in various situations in daily life.