Feasibility of Diagnosing Dead Regions Using Auditory Steady-State Responses to an Exponentially Amplitude Modulated Tone in Threshold Equalizing Notched Noise, Assessed Using Normal-Hearing Participants.
Emanuele Perugia, Frederic Marmel, Karolina Kluk
PMID 37384583WHAT IT FOUND
The proposed objective test failed to match the behavioral standard in normal-hearing adults.
Only four of fifteen participants showed the expected brainwave pattern, and the method's variability was too high for clinical use.
Key findings
01The electrophysiological measure showed poor agreement with the behavioral task, with a bias of -0.56 kHz and limits of agreement spanning over 3 kHz.
02Within-session repeatability was poor, with the brainwave amplitude varying by 61.7% of the mean between recording halves.
03The test failed to diagnose dead regions in the target population, as only four of fifteen participants exhibited the predicted response pattern.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was conducted only on normal-hearing adults, so it does not prove the method fails in patients with actual hearing loss or dead regions, though it suggests the signal is too noisy. The notch width was fixed at two octaves, which the authors note may have broadened the masking curves and obscured precise frequency tuning. The ASSR recording time was short and intermittent, which likely contributed to the high variability in response amplitudes. One participant's data was excluded due to corrupted recordings, leaving 14 for analysis.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the EPSRC, Action on Hearing Loss, MRC, and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the failure in normal-hearing adults as proof the test will never work for patients. The study shows the current version is too variable to be reliable, but the authors suggest refinements like longer recording times might improve it. It is not yet a clinical tool.