Hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss in adults
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews·
- DOI
- 10.1002/14651858.cd012023.pub3
- PMID
- 42644645
- PMCID
- —
- OpenAlex
- —
- Study type
- Systematic review
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Article type
- journal-article
- Integrity
- current
Why this research matters now
Findings align with routine first-line clinical provision of hearing aids to adults seeking help for hearing difficulties, while signalling ongoing uncertainty around benefits for mental health and cognition.
Structured evidence summary
Research question
The review addresses whether acoustic hearing aids provide benefit or cause harm in adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, updating a prior Cochrane review and adding mental health and cognition as outcomes.
Study design
This is a Cochrane systematic review with meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials and cross-over trials. Risk of bias was appraised using the Cochrane RoB 1 tool, and certainty of evidence was assessed with GRADE.
Population and setting
The review included 16 RCTs with 2,261 participants with mild to moderate hearing loss, mostly older adults (mean ages 58–83 years), conducted in the USA, Europe, Brazil, Hong Kong and Australia.
Main findings
Hearing aids likely produce a large improvement in hearing-specific health-related quality of life (participation) and listening ability compared with control. A small benefit was suggested for general health-related quality of life. Effects on loneliness and working memory were uncertain or absent, and adverse-effect data on pain and noise-induced hearing loss were very uncertain.
Public-health relevance
Findings align with routine first-line clinical provision of hearing aids to adults seeking help for hearing difficulties, while signalling ongoing uncertainty around benefits for mental health and cognition.
Important limitations
Most included studies had high or unclear risk of performance and detection bias due to inadequate or absent blinding, and several outcomes were downgraded for imprecision or indirectness, yielding very low to moderate certainty. The summary is limited to the supplied single-article abstract/metadata and requires the original paper for decision-grade interpretation.
GIDS interpretation
This is a peer-reviewed Cochrane update; no discoverability signal beyond publication metadata is provided, so no connection to a live surveillance signal can be inferred.
Related GIDS surveillance
Literature context does not validate, explain, or change a surveillance signal. Exact and contextual relationships are shown separately.
Evidence relationships
This article has 8 auditable classifier relationships to diseases, places, topics, and study design.