【Fitting Column】Practical Fitting Experience: The Importance of a Comprehensive Pure Tone Test

Many situations may be encountered in the process of hearing aid fitting, but the impact of insufficiently standardized and comprehensive pure tone audiometry on hearing aid fitting is often overlooked.

Some fitting centers pay great attention to air conduction hearing testing, but ignore the examination of bone conduction and discomfort threshold.Most opticians think that just fitting hearing aids with reference to the hearing test results is not a big problem.However, the two user situations encountered recently changed this author’s view.

According to the results of pure tone test air conduction, binaural hearing should be moderate and severeHearing loss.However, it is difficult for super-power hearing aids to provide an ideal compensation effect for their poor ears.

He then added a bone conduction hearing test and found that his bilateral bone conduction hearing was mildly impaired.

So in fact, his previous hearing test results are inaccurate. The cross hearing caused by bone conduction eavesdropping is not the patient’s actual hearing level.

Although the inter-aural attenuation value will vary due to factors such as individuals, conditions and test environment, if the air conduction threshold of the test ear and the bone conduction threshold of the non-test ear are greater than or equal to 40dB, masked audiometry should be implemented; otherwise, it will Create many false appearances of shadow hearing.The common masking methods include platform method and ladder method.The principles of the two are similar, but the ladder method will save time.

At the same time, the bone conduction test can also help determine the location of the patient’s hearing loss, and can better distinguish between conductive and sensorineural hearing loss.Therefore, if time permits, conduct a comprehensive pure tone test as much as possible, including air conduction, bone conduction, and discomfort threshold checks, which will help improve the accuracy and satisfaction of the fitting. http://www.jhhearingaids.com

Written by Liang Yuhao from China

Audit/Chinese-made Wu

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