Predicting hearing aid use in adults: the Beaver Dam Offspring Study.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to (i) develop a model that predicts hearing aid (HA) use and (ii) determine if model fit is improved by adding factors not typically collected in audiological evaluations.
Design: Two models were created and evaluated. The "clinical" model used factors typically collected during audiologic clinical evaluations. The "expanded" model considered additional clinical, health and lifestyle factors to determine if the model fit could be improved (compared to clinical model). Models were created with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) logistic regression with 10-fold cross validation. Predictive ability was evaluated via receiver operating characteristic curves and concordance statistics (c-statistics).
Study Sample: This study included 275 participants from the Beaver Dam Offspring Study, a prospective longitudinal cohort study of aging, with a treatable level of hearing loss and no HA use at baseline.
Results: The clinical and expanded models report predictors important for HA use. The c-statistics of the clinical (0.80) and expanded (0.79) models were not significantly different ( p  = 0.41).
Conclusions: Similar predictive abilities of models suggest audiological evaluations perform well in predicting HA use.