gms | German Medical Science

Objective: Patients with aphasia need speech and language therapy [1]. During all day communication and during speech and language therapy it is difficult to differentiate between truly aphasic symptoms and communication disorders caused by hearing loss. In patients with aphasia classic speech recognition distance tests will not be successful in most cases. Most of these patients are not able to understand and to repeat spoken words.

Material and methods: In our study 88 patients with aphasia treated in a neurologic rehabilitation clinic minimum 2 weeks after left cerebral stroke were assessed by otoscopy and pure tone audiometry. 72 patients (33 women/38 men, 42–88 years old) were able to undergo the audiometric setting successfully. The diagnosis of hearing loss requiring hearing aids was put according to the German health insurance definition of hearing aids treatment [2], [3] (Hearing loss in the better ear minimum 30 dB between 0,5 and 3 kHz).

Results: 8 patients (9%) needed a professional ENT-treatment because of ceruminal obstruction. Only 5 (5.7%) persons did not cooperate sufficiently in pure tone audiometry. According to audiometric exploration 17 (23%) of 72 patients showed a hearing loss necessitating a hearing aid fitting. Only 2 patients wore hearing aids the date of the assessment.

Conclusion: Pure tone audiometry is possible in most patients with aphasia. To identify patients with aphasia suffering from hearing loss it is necessary to implement otoscopy and pure tone audiometry in all patients. In case of hearing loss these patients need an ENT-treatment including hearing aid fitting.