Age Affects Responses on the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) by Adults with Minimal Audiometric Loss

Abstract

By establishing the best scores that could reasonably be expected from younger and older adults with "normal" hearing thresholds, these results provide clinicians with information that should assist them in setting realistic targets for interventions for adults of different ages.

Auditory difficulties in blast-exposed Veterans with clinically normal hearing

“…A higher SSQ questionnaire score indicates fewer hearing difficulties. Once again, these data illustrate that the SSQ questionnaire scores of participants in this study are more similar to the scores of older individuals with hearing loss in Gatehouse and Noble [27] than they are to either the young or older normal-hearing individuals in Bahn et al [42]. Where possible, these Table 4.…”

“…To this end, data collected from 99 blast-exposed Veterans with hearing difficulties but clinically normal hearing sensitivity were examined as part of a larger RCT in which auditory rehabilitative interventions were compared. As seen in Tables 3 and 4, participants perceived considerable hearing difficulty, such that their FHQ and SSQ questionnaire scores were more like those of older individuals with hearing impairment * [27], than they were to individuals of equivalent age and normal hearing sensitivity [9,42]. A similar finding was reported in a population of OIF Veterans with blast-related TBI, among whom 11 percent reported hearing difficulties yet had clinically normal hearing [12] and in a survey of VA audiologists that found that 92 percent of audiologists encountered at least one OIF/OEF Veteran a month who had difficulties hearing and yet had normal or almost normal pure tone sensitivity, with 53 percent of audiologists encountering between one and three per month and 39 percent encountering four or more per month [14].…”

Incapacidade auditiva medida por meio do questionário Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ): estudo piloto da versão reduzida em Português Brasileiro

“…A previous study identified a pattern of responses to the items of the SSQ for different age groups, where adults attained higher scores than elderly. In individuals with normal hearing, adults had a mean score of 8.8 and elderly 7.7 (8) . By contrast, mean scores of 5.5 were found in elderly with moderate hearing loss (5) .…”

“…Thus, the SSQ scale explores aspects of hearing through 49 items organized into three subscales measuring: the capacity of the individual to listen to speech in different hearing contexts (Part 1 -speech hearing); localization of sound events for different directions, distances and movement (Part 2 -spatial hearing); and the listening experience in relation to segregating sounds, identification/ recognition, clarity and naturalness, musical perception and listening effort; (Part 3 -qualities of hearing) (5) . In the international literature, there are studies that apply the SSQ in different contexts investigating hearing loss and its impact (6,7,8,9) . Recently, in Brazil, SSQ 49 version 5.6 was translated and culturally adapted to Brazilian Portuguese and is currently undergoing the process of validation (10) .…”

Effects of age and hearing loss on stream segregation based on interaural time differences

“…Older listeners report significantly more difficulty in everyday listening in the presence of background sounds than younger listeners (Gatehouse and Noble, 2004;Banh et al, 2012). Such age-related disability in the parsing of complex (i.e., multi-source) auditory scenes can result from cochlear hearing impairment and/or deficits in supra-threshold auditory and cognitive processing, affecting either the encoding of the acoustic cues used to parse auditory scenes or the parsing mechanism itself.…”