ABSTRACT
Purpose:
to identify criteria used nationally and internationally to classify degrees of hearing loss, compare them with what is established in the Brazilian law, and discuss possible consequences of such a law on the social protection of people with hearing loss.
Methods:
a narrative review was conducted to identify the criteria used in this classification, by searching the platforms VHL and PubMed in April 2020. It included primary human research explicitly mentioning the criteria used to classify the degree of hearing loss, published between 2015 and 2019 in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Literature Review:
there is a preference for the four-frequency mean at 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz. The Brazilian law does not follow these criteria, which may pose a barrier to people with hearing loss, hindering their access to social protection programs.
Final Considerations:
there is no consensus on the best criteria, although the most encompassing ones in hearing assessment predominate - which are not the ones legally used in Brazil. It is necessary to debate the Brazilian legal criteria to ensure existing social rights to part of people with hearing loss in Brazil.
Keywords:
Legislation; Diagnosis; Hearing Tests; Deafness; Persons with Hearing Impairments; Public Policy
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Source: Developed by the authors.
Source: Developed by the authors.Caption: NA = Not available.Note*: Study types and methods reported in this chart were explicitly informed by the authors; when not clearly informed in the article, they were inferred from the methodological procedures they described.