BEAR: A status on population characteristics of hearing-aid users obtained from the database

Recent studies estimate that around 20% of the hearing aid (HA) owners in Denmark do not regularly use their HA, which implies that they are not satisfied with the HA treatment and did not experience the benefits they expected. The overall vision of the BEAR project is to improve hearing rehabilitation in Denmark through an evidence-based renewal of clinical practice and optimization of the individual HA fitting, resulting in a successful hearing aid treatment. Initially the project aims to describe the current clinical practice, by building a clinical database containing the existing data on HA profiling and fitting strategies. Data from 2000 patients are collected from the departments of Audiology in Odense and Aalborg University Hospital. Some of the registered variables include gender, age, and health related questions, noise exposure and whether they are suffering from tinnitus. The database thereby contains descriptive data on the current population of HA users in Denmark and their health status. Descriptive data in different relevant subgroups of HA users obtained from the database will be presented. Based on the results, analyses of average age and the distribution of gender in different subgroups of HA users, including experienced versus new HA users will be made. Previous noise exposure and the relation to the occurrence of tinnitus will be investigated as well.