Introduction:
In Germany are up to 18.5 million adults existing. Only 16% of them are fitted with
hearing aids. To lower this rate a simple screening method for detecting a hearing
loss (hl) for 50 years and older aged patients for general practicioners (GP) is necessary.
Therefore, a few years ago the Mini-Audio-Test (MAT) has been developed in 12 German
out-clinic ENT-offices. This MAT is an inventory of 6 questions of daily life hearing
situations. The subject has to answer using a three level scale, how severe the handicap
in hearing by the described situation is. The primary found sensitivity (se), specificity
(sp), and positive predictive value (pv) for detecting a hearing loss of at least
25 dB in one or more of the octave-freqeuencies between 0.5 and 4.0 kHz in should
be controlled on a normal Population before it cout be recommended for a use by GP
in general.
Methods:
Between June 2016 and August 2017 in total 943 patients without any diseases of the
ear from age of 50 years and older were testet by the MAT. In addition, the hearing
loss was measured by pure-tone audiometry. The se and sp for the age classes lower
60 years (ac1) and older (ac2) were determined and the pv by using the binomial test
calculated.
Results:
The se was for ac1 0.66 (CI 0.59; 0.72), the sp 0.61 (CI 0.55; 0.68), and the pv was
0.60. For ac2 se was 0.47 (CI 0.42; 0.52), sp 0.80 (CI 0.73; 0.84), and the pv was
0.89.
Conclusions:
These values are a little worse than the the values given by the first study. This
could be explained by a higher prevalence of HL in ENT-offices. Nevertheless, the
MAT could be recommended as a simple, quick, and cheap instrument for screening on
HL used by GP.
