Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) are objective measures of auditory function, but are not hearing tests. Normal OAEs reflect normal cochlear outer hair cell function, and an ABR indicates a synchronous neural response. It is quite possible for a patient to have normal OAEs but absent or grossly abnormal ABR and a behavioral audiogram that is inconsistent with...

It has long been known that some listeners experience hearing difficulties out of proportion with their audiometric losses. Notably, some older adults as well as auditory neuropathy patients have temporal-processing and speech-in-noise intelligibility deficits not accountable for by elevated audiometric thresholds. The study of these hearing deficits has been revitalized by recent studies that ...

OBJECTIVE To medically and audiologically characterize a population of children diagnosed as having auditory neuropathy (AN). STUDY DESIGN Retrospective medical chart review. SETTING/SUBJECTS We identified 22 patients from a pediatric otology clinic in a tertiary care pediatric hospital setting. RESULTS A genetic factor in AN is suggested by our identification of 3 families with 2 affecte...

Patients with auditory neuropathy/dyssynchrony exhibit no auditory brain stem response (ABR), no middle ear muscle response, and both normal otoacoustic emissions or normal cochlear microphonics. An absent or grossly abnormal ABR is not always associated with deafness. In contrast, a hearing loss of 30 dB or more usually predicts absent otoacoustic emissions, but normal emissions can be seen in...

In 1991, Arnold Starr and colleagues described an 11-year-old child with the paradoxic findings of absent auditory brainstem responses in the presence of normal cochlear microphonics (CMs) and otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). The child demonstrated severely impaired speech understanding despite a mild loss of hearing sensitivity. Further evaluation showed impaired temporal processing as exhibited ...

PURPOSE Speech perception in participants with auditory neuropathy (AN) was systematically studied to answer the following 2 questions: Does noise present a particular problem for people with AN? Can clear speech and cochlear implants alleviate this problem? METHOD The researchers evaluated the advantage in intelligibility of clear speech over conversational speech in 13 participants with AN....

Auditory neuropathy (AN) has been described in the literature as presenting with a combination of audiometric findings that include elevated behavioral audiometric thresholds, auditory brainstem response findings that are not consistent with audiometric findings, poor speech recognition, and present otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) and/or cochlear microphonics. Since the availability of clinical OA...