Speech audiometry test with verbal tasks and motor responses

Objective: To evaluate the use of the test with Verbal Tasks and Motor Responses (VTMR) while examining aged patients with hearing loss or cognitive impairment Design: Aged patients with and without hearing loss were examined. All listeners underwent the common speech test in quiet composed of 30 polysyllabic words and the Russian version of VTMR to evaluate speech intelligibility, the mini-mental state examination to detect the presence of cognitive impairment. Their results were compared to show the influence of cognitive impairment and hearing loss on the results of the speech audiometry. Study sample: Overall, 32 aged listeners: 20 hearing impaired patients, hearing aid (HA) users, and 12 patients with normal hearing thresholds and mild cognitive impairment. Results: All listeners performed VTMR significantly better than the polysyllabic words recognition test. In the group of hearing impaired patients the percentage of tasks correctly executed was 73.2±29.2 without HA and 88.6±20.5% with them, speech recognition score was 34.8±20.9 without HA and 56.0±18.4% with it. All patients of the group with normal hearing and mild cognitive impairment performed VTMR 100%, their speech recognition was 88.0±12.0% Conclusions: The VTMR is valuable test for assessing the HA efficacy in patients with hearing impairment or patients older than 75 years old.