Principles and clinical applications of auditory evoked potentials in the geriatric population.
Age-related changes in auditory evoked potentials are complex and complicated by the confounding effects of gender; concomitant high-frequency hearing sensitivity loss; and, in the case of event-related responses, the nature of the task used to elicit the response. There is a tendency for amplitude to decline and latency to increase, but these trends are not always clear-cut. There is also a tendency for activation patterns to move forward from parietal to frontal areas as age increases. The dichotic listening tool has revealed age-related changes in interaural and interhemispheric asymmetries. These asymmetries seem to be related to loss in the efficiency of interhemispheric transfer via the corpus callosum.
Jerger
James
J
Program in Cognition and Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Dallas, 2612 Prairie Creek Drive East, Richardson, TX 75080-2679, USA. jjerger@utdallas.edu
Lew
Henry L
HL
D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis