Abstract
The social hearing handicap index (SHI) was studied in a group of 551 hard of hearing persons, who were fitted with hearing aids for the first time in their lives. When relating the SHI to the speech reception threshold (SRT) in the better ear it was found that the hearing handicap—as experienced by the patients themselves—is at least as great as the physical hearing loss expressed in SRT-values—in most cases even greater. Thus the SHI gives supplementary information to our objective measures. Applied to different diagnostic groups and type of tone audiogram the SHI before and after treatment with hearing aids expresses the therapeutic gain, which was biggest in the groups of patients with conductive disorders and with flat audiograms. In relation to different age groups—young, middleaged, elderly and old—the subjectively experienced therapeutic gain proved to be the same for the first three groups and somewhat less for the last group, the old ones over 75 years of age.
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