Tinnitus Management: Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Extended‐Wear Hearing Aids, Conventional Hearing Aids, and Combination Instruments | Semantic Scholar (2024)

This study demonstrates the benefit of partial masking, encouraging patients to seek help from audiologists interested in providing support for tinnitus patients.

Results from this study support that a combination of hearing aid use and IC can help improve tinnitus in people with mild hearing loss.

This is a consolidated standards of reporting trials-guided study providing direct evidence for tinnitus suppression effects of HA alone, without accompanying counseling or any other treatments, which lasted for at least 3 months after patients stopped using HAs.

There was insufficient evidence to support the superiority of the combined use of HA and EC for tinnitus over EC with no device, and both groups yielded a similar trend of reduction.

The Oticon miniRITE R combination hearing aids used in this study resulted in similar improvements for both new and existing hearing aid users, suggesting that the tinnitus-reducing effects of these aids were greater than those already being used by participants.

It is shown that both hearing aids and sound generators may be beneficial for reducing tinnitus severity in some patients, but that there is insufficient evidence at this stage to recommend one device over another, or whether these devices offer any improvement over a placebo treatment.

Future studies taking into account the different nature and goals of each tinnitus therapeutic modality and adapting their methods, endpoints and timelines according to them could lay the groundwork for obtaining high-quality evidence on whether and how HA fitting shall be implemented in tinnitis management strategies.

A defined clinical protocol is suggested for audiologists, which includes a case history, appropriate referral, audiologic assessment, use of the Tinnitus and Hearing Survey, and criteria for determining if further tinnitus-specific services are needed.

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TRT was equally effective with sound generator or open ear hearing aids: they gave basically identical, statistically indistinguishable results.

As expected, the hearing aids improved the hearing capacity, but they did not reduce tinnitus as recorded on a visual analogue scale, and the results of scaling (pre- and post-fitting) did not support this finding.

The current evidence base for hearing aid prescription for tinnitus is limited and to be useful, future studies should make appropriate use of blinding and be consistent in their use of outcome measures.

The main aim of this study was to verify whether the combined use of amplification and sound generator is more effective than conventional amplification alone in reducing tinnitus annoyance by means of the use of a new hearing aid with an integrated sound generator.

Evidence is provided that the Tinnitus and Hearing Survey is statistically validated and reliable for use in assisting patients and clinicians in quickly determining whether intervention for tinnitus is appropriate.

The Tinnitus Handicap Inventory is a self-report measure that can be used in a busy clinical practice to quantify the impact of tinnitus on daily living and yielded excellent internal consistency reliability.

It was found that identification, attention and effort problems, as well as spatial hearing problems, feature prominently in the disability-handicap relationship, along with certain features of speech hearing.

The psychometric properties of the inventory for the original English version are reported, providing adequate statistical support for summing the scores to generate a total outcome score.

The SSQ12 provides similar results to SSQ49 in a large clinical research sample as well as providing a formula for converting scores between the full and abbreviated versions of the Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing scale.

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