[Communicative performance using hearing aids (author's transl)].

By means of a questionnaire the utilization of hearing aids has been investigated in 550 patients who had received their aids in the way being typical for the Federal Republic of Germany, i.e. after being prescribed by the ENT-specialist the hearing aid is fitted by the hearing aid acoustician. Additionally the study aimed to analyze relevant factors influencing the use of hearing aids. 45% of the patients used their aids always, 52% regularly (on special occasions) and 3,1% never. The most common complaints of patients refusing their hearing aid were disturbing noise and unsatisfactory understanding. A relatively better utilization of hearing aids--as compared with the average use of the whole group--was found in children, in patients with a hearing loss of a higher degree or with a conductive hearing loss and in patients wearing aids on both ears or aids having a PC-circuit or a so-called "dynamic compression". Relatively lower utilization was seen in patients being older than 60 years, in patients wearing the hearing aid on the worse ear and in workmen. Further factors related to less regular use were: mild hearing loss and high-tone deafness, bone conductive earphone, eyeglass hearing aid and AVC-circuit. There was no correlation between the hearing aid use and the monosyllable discrimination score.