Investigation of the findings of high frequency hearing, masking level difference, auditory disability, exaggeration of physical sensations, depression and quality of life in adults having incompatibility between self-reported hearing status and audiometric test results

The aim of this study is to evaluate the auditory and non-auditory factors in patients having incompatibility betweenself-reported hearing status and audiometric findings. The study group consisted of 80 individuals aged between 19-55 years. Two groups were formedas compatible and incompatible, each of them having 40 people. Individuals who were found to have normal hearing (SSO≤25 dB) without any reported hearing loss were included in the compatible group. Individuals who were found to have normal hearing (SSO≤25 dB) with reported hearing loss were included in the incompatible group. Anamnesis of all individuals included in the study was taken and an otological examination was performed.All individuals were subjected to immittance-metric evaluation, pure tone audiometry, speech audiometry, masking level difference (MLD) test and high frequency audiometry, respectively. After the audiological evaluation, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Somatosensory Amplification Scale (SSAS), World Health Organization Short Form of Quality of Life (WHOQOL-Bref) and Amsterdam Inventory forAuditory Disabilityand Handicap (AIADH) were applied to all individuals. No significant difference was found between the compatible and incompatible groups in terms of high frequency hearing thresholds and MLD (p> 0.05). In the incompatible group, BDI score was higher than the compatible group (p<0.05). Individuals in the incompatible group were performed significantly poorer than the compatible group (p <0.05), regarding to the scores of differentiating between sounds, localization of sounds, recognition of sounds, and intelligibility of speech in silence and noise. Quality of life scores were lower in the noncompliant group than the compatible group (p <0.05). As a result, in the individuals who have auditory insufficiency with the self-reported assessmentalthough we have detected normal audiometric thresholds; depression, exaggeration of somatic sensations and influence in quality of life were observed. In line with our findings, it was concluded that audiometric evaluation might be insufficient to reflect the individual's hearing difficulty and more detailed objective and subjective evaluations may be useful in evaluating hearing difficulties. Keywords: Auditory insuffucuency, depression, hearing, inventory, quality of life