Effects of age and degree of hearing loss on the agreement and correlation between sound field audiometric thresholds and tone burst auditory brainstem response thresholds in infants and young children.
OBJECTIVE
Early hearing rehabilitation programs eventually require measurement of the hearing threshold cutoff values over the whole range of speech frequencies. With tone burst auditory brainstem responses, excellent agreement and correlation between evoked-potential and behavioral thresholds have been demonstrated by previous studies. This study investigated the effects of different ages and degrees of hearing loss on the agreement and correlation in a large series of infants and young children in Taiwan.


METHODS
Medical records were reviewed from a large series of 1281 infants and young children aged from 3 months to 3 years who had undergone diagnostic audiometry, including sound field audiometry and tone burst auditory brainstem response measurements. The effects of age and hearing loss on the agreement and correlation between two measured thresholds were studied.


RESULTS
Significant correlations (p < 0.001) were seen between the two measured thresholds across groups of different ages and different degrees of hearing loss greater than 20 dB HL. However, the degree of correlation deteriorated at lower degrees of hearing loss. Correlations for hearing thresholds less than 20 dB HL were not significant at 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz.


CONCLUSIONS
The evoked-potentials test, properly obtained and interpreted with respect to the effects of age and degree of hearing loss, may provide a very informative hearing threshold reference to help in behavioral audiometric evaluation in infants and young children with hearing loss.
Lee
Chung-Yi
CY
Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University College of Medicine and College of Engineering, and Department of Otolaryngology, National Taiwan University College of Medicine and University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
Jaw
Fu-Shan
FS
Pan
Shin-Liang
SL
Hsieh
Tai-Hsin
TH
Hsu
Chuan-Jen
CJ
D000367:Age Factors; D001300:Audiometry, Evoked Response; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D015331:Cohort Studies; D016057:Evoked Potentials, Auditory, Brain Stem / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013017:Sound Localization / Q000502:physiology*; D013624:Taiwan