Photo credit: Kae Yen Wong licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
The December 20, 2022, issue of JAMA contained three important articles about personal sound amplification products. Since these may be behind the JAMA paywall, you may have to find the articles in a public or university or hospital library, but I will summarize the relevant information in this blog post.
As Reed et al., noted in 2019, “[p]ersonal sound amplification products (PSAPs) are less-expensive, over-the-counter devices not specifically labeled for hearing loss treatment, but some are technologically comparable with hearing aids and may be appropriate for mild to moderate hearing loss.” Basically, PSAPs are cheaper, less advanced, over-the-counter hearing aids that can be purchased without seeing an ear doctor or an audiologist.
The recent JAMA issue included a report by a team at Johns Hopkins University about community health workers delivering PSAPs to older adults with hearing loss, which found that having trained community health workers provide PSAPS significantly improved self-perceived communication function at three months compared with control subjects who were on a waiting list for service, and two commentaries, one by Dr. Tyler James and Dr. Michael McKee at the University of Michigan Medical School, the other by Dr. Debara Tucci at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and Dr. Robert Califf at the FDA. Drs. James and McKee point out that PSAPs by themselves do not address all problems caused by hearing loss, especially for older people, where as Drs. Tucci and Califf tout the success of the Over-the counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017.
I’m a skeptic about whether PSAPs by themselves will benefit the many Americans, especially older Americans, who need amplification to hear better. As hearing health advocate Shari Eberts has pointed out, hearing aids aren’t like eyeglasses. The Baltimore study provided the PSAPs to the subjects, with community health care workers helping the recipients learn how to use them. In the real world, people will have to pay for their own PSAPs and in most cases are on their own, perhaps with internet support available to help them if they have high-speed internet access and know how to use a computer. Also, audiologists have told me that there’s as much art as science in fitting the right hearing aid to the right patient.
I hope I’m wrong and that PSAPs actually do help the millions of Americans with hearing loss. Only time will tell.
