Preservation of Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions in OTOF -Related Hearing Impairment.
Rosamaria Santarelli, Pietro Scimemi, Elona Cama and 5 others
PMID 37677959WHAT IT FOUND
Many children and adults with OTOF hearing loss still showed DPOAE responses for years, sometimes into adulthood.
Apparent loss in some cases coincided with middle ear effusion, so check middle ear status before assuming outer hair cells are gone.
Key findings
01Only one of the 16 patients lost OAEs, and that loss occurred a few months after birth.
02DPOAEs were attenuated or absent when tympanometry showed middle ear dysfunction, and they recovered when the middle ear returned to normal.
03Ten patients diagnosed or followed up after age 3 still had DPOAEs at last follow-up, at ages 4.8 to 47 years.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study included only 16 patients, and some children had no further DPOAE recordings because parents chose to refer to other institutions. Middle ear effusion was present in 11 of 16 patients at least once, and it can reduce or mask DPOAEs. High noise levels in active toddlers may hide positive DPOAE responses, as seen in subject no. 15. Only a small number of subjects were followed up since age 1 to 3 years, so normal developmental changes in DPOAE amplitude were difficult to separate from disease-related changes. Only 4 patients used hearing aids for longer than 1 year, so the effects of amplification on DPOAEs could not be assessed.
Declared interests
The work was supported by grants from Instituto de Salud Carlos III, with cofunding from the European Regional Development Fund, and by the Department of excellence initiative of the Italian Ministry of education. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read absent or reduced DPOAEs as proof that outer hair cells are lost in OTOF hearing impairment. In this study, only one of 16 patients lost OAEs a few months after birth, and other apparent losses occurred with middle ear effusion or noisy recordings.