Use of heart rate response for the assessment of hearing in infants.
The clinical utility of the heart rate (HR) response as an index of hearing in infant children under 12 months of age was investigated. The most prominent component of the averaged HR response elicited with a short tone burst of 100 msec duration was a brief HR deceleration which mostly occurred between the first and second beats after stimulation. The mean response detectability for tones of 250 Hz and 1 kHz were 50, 82 and 100%, with stimulations of 40, 60 and 80 dB above subjective threshold of normal adults, respectively. The detectability decreased a little at 4 kHz stimulation. Though there was an individual variability in the appearance of the response, the method was considered to be useful as a supplementary tool for evaluating hearing in infant children.
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D006320:Hearing Tests / Q000379:methods*; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant