Assessment of Quality of Life in Adults with Hearing Impairment

Background: Hearing loss (HL) in adults is loss of ability to perceive surrounding environmental sounds. There may be environmental or genetic cause of this disability. Presently expectancy of old adult age is going to increase as in the same way hearing problems and its negative impact on health wellbeing standard of living also increased, the beneficial of current study is to be addressed, or give awareness about health consequences to adult population with hearing impairment.

Aim: To determine the quality of life in adults with hearing impairment.

Place and Duration of Study: Riphah international University, Lahore campus between December 2018 to May 2019.

Methodology: A cross sectional survey was conducted on 67 adults with hearing impairment (sample size was calculated on the base of prevalence of hearing loss in the Express Tribute, (March 4, 2014) which was a Pakistani study on hearing impaired population the president of famous organization the developmental diseases and community of auditory handicap MR Afzal estimated the occurrence of auditory deficits in Pakistan region was in between 7 to 8 percent on per 10,000 living birth ,this prevalence was used to calculate sample size by using online calculator).(1), their age range were 18 to 55 (elder adults) and 56 to 97(older adults). Data collection tool which was used in this research was 15D Quality of life questionnaire to find out the influence of hearing loss (HL) on daily living activities in adult’s life. Sampling technique used in this research was convenient sampling. For this purpose, descriptive analysis was done for demographics and chi square was used for inferential analysis by using SPSS20. Endnote was used for references.

Results: There are four domains of quality of life (speech, usual activities, mental functioning, and vitality status of participants) which have highly significant relationship value(<0.001) with hearing impairment, in other domains of quality of life p value is less then (<0.05) this means that other domains of quality of life have also significant relationship with hearing impairment except visual or sexual activity of the participants which have no significant association p- value(>0.05)with hearing impairment.

Conclusion: Research concluded that domains of quality of life are significantly associated with hearing loss which have negative impact on the QOL(quality of life) except visual or sexual activity, but these two domains may also indirectly have associated or may affect the quality of life individually in adults with hearing impairment.