Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Nowon Eulji Medical Center, Eulji University, Seoul, Korea.
Division of ENT, Sleep Disordered Breathing, Respiratory, and Anesthesia, Office of Product Evaluation and Quality, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, US Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA.
J Int Adv Otol. 2022 Jan;18(1):43-50. doi: 10.5152/iao.2022.21228.
The aims of this study were to evaluate the long-term effects of hearing-aid use on auditory spectral discrimination, temporal envelope sensitivity, and speech perception ability and to determine whether hearing performance changes with the duration of hearing-aid use.
The study included 13 elderly participants (64.15 ± 9.87 years) who had used hearing-aids for 12 months in everyday life. We compared the auditory performance without hearing-aids at the time of pre-fitting with the auditory performance with hearing-aids at 1 month and 12 months after fitting. Three different psychoacoustic measurements were made at their most comfortable levels to exclude the effect of amplification: (1) spectral-ripple discrimination, (2) temporal modulation detection, and (3) speech recognition in white noise.
Repeated-measures analysis of variance demonstrated that the duration of hearing-aid use significantly affected spectral-ripple discrimination thresholds and 100 Hz temporal modulation detection threshold (P < .05). Post hoc tests revealed that the improvements in spectral discrimination in the early post-fitting stage (1 month) did not seem to increase over the period of hearing-aid use, whereas the temporal envelope sensitivity improved continuously over time (up to 12 months).
These results imply that hearing-aid users adapt to hearing-aid processing for spectral discrimination immediately, whereas they need time to adapt to hearing-aid processing for temporal envelope sensitivity. Alternatively, long-term hearing-aid use could induce positive plastic changes exclusively in terms of temporal envelope sensitivity.
本研究旨在评估助听使用对听觉频谱辨别、时间包络敏感性和言语感知能力的长期影响，并确定听力表现是否随助听使用时间的变化而变化。
本研究纳入 13 名年龄较大的参与者（64.15±9.87 岁），他们在日常生活中使用助听器已有 12 个月。我们将助听器适配前未佩戴助听器时的听觉表现与佩戴 1 个月和 12 个月后的听觉表现进行了比较。在最舒适的水平上进行了三种不同的心理声学测量，以排除放大的影响：（1）频谱波纹辨别，（2）时间调制检测，（3）噪声中的言语识别。
重复测量方差分析表明，助听使用时间显著影响频谱波纹辨别阈值和 100Hz 时间调制检测阈值（P<.05）。事后检验表明，在早期适配阶段（1 个月），频谱辨别能力的提高似乎并没有随着助听使用时间的延长而增加，而时间包络敏感性则随着时间的推移持续提高（直至 12 个月）。
这些结果表明，助听器使用者立即适应助听器处理对频谱辨别能力的处理，而需要时间来适应助听器处理对时间包络敏感性的处理。或者，长期使用助听器可能仅在时间包络敏感性方面引起积极的塑性变化。
