Identifying a sample of people with hidden hearing loss (HHL)

Abstract

Hearing difficulties are a commonly reported health issue, especially in older adults. Clinically, hearing deficits are normally identified by using pure-tone thresholds (PTTs). PTTs evaluate the ability to detect a near-threshold tone, which can be conceptualized as the ability to detect a quiet sound in a quiet environment. Interestingly, there are some individuals who report hearing difficulties, despite having normal PTTs, which has been referred to as ‘hidden hearing loss’ (HHL). A common difficulty reported by this group is understanding speech when there is background noise. Understanding speech-in-noise (SPiN) is a complex cognitive task where basic auditory features, learned schemata and other perceptual inputs are used to segregate speech from background noise. Very little is known about the neurophysiology or genetics of HHL. Accordingly, this study proposes a novel method of identifying HHL candidates and develops a sample of such individuals to further explore the underlying mechanisms. PTTs were compared with performance on two SPiN assessments in 100 participants. PTTs predicted performance on SPiN performance for most participants; however, 26 participants performed worse on the SPiN tasks than would be predicted given their PTTs. It is likely that this sample has HHL, and future studies can use these participants to study the neurophysiology and genetics of this hearing deficit.