Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults and Audiological Findings in Cancer Patients

Introduction: Hearing evaluation usually includes hearing threshold assessment that lead to an accurate result of peripheral and central auditory system. However, it has some limitations because it cannot fully encompass all aspects of hearing loss problems. The communicative ability of cancer patients with sensory-neural hearing loss depends on important factors, such as acceptance or denial of hearing loss, general communication skills, emotional adaptation, friends and family condition.

Aim: To compare Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults results to conventional pure tone audiometry finding of cancer patients.

Method: In this research, 26 cancer patients in chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy treatment with a mean age of 28.48 (±12.43) were studied. It was used a self-assessment approach, Hearing Handicap Inventory for adults screening version and conventional pure tone audiometry. Statistical analysis was performed (t-test, chi-square test) with a significance level of 95% (p < 0.05).

Results: Of the cancer patients (n=26), 7.7% had significant self-perception of hearing handicap and social scale had highest score. About 15.5% of them have sensorineural hearing loss characterized by changes in high frequencies (6 and 8 kHz) and 3.8% conductive hearing loss. The effects of the hearing loss level on the self-scores indicated that there is no significant relationship with hearing loss (p = 0.43). There was a positive correlation between age and self-perception of hearing handicap (p = 0.00), older people had highest scores.

Conclusion: The current results demonstrate that there is no correlation between hearing handicap and hearing loss in cancer patients.