Speech Auditory Brainstem Responses in Adult Hearing Aid Users: Effects of Aiding and Background Noise, and Prediction of Behavioral Measures.
Ghada BinKhamis, Antonio Elia Forte, Tobias Reichenbach and 2 others
PMID 31264513WHAT IT FOUND
A speech brainstem test did not tell how well adults understood speech in noise or rated hearing in daily life, even though hearing aids made some responses earlier and larger.
Key findings
01Hearing aids produced significantly earlier speech-ABR peak latencies and, for peaks VA, D, and F, significantly larger amplitudes than unaided testing.
02Background noise did not significantly change speech-ABR peak latencies or amplitudes, but F0 encoding latencies were significantly earlier in quiet than in noise.
03In models including aided speech-ABR F0 encoding, pure tone average was the only significant predictor of BKB-SIN SRT-50, VCV SRT-50, and SSQ-Speech.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Six of 98 participants had no detectable speech-ABR peaks and were excluded; 11 participants were missing from the prediction models, leaving 81 participants for those analyses. The speech-ABR recording used two-talker babble at +10 dB SNR, while behavioral sentence and consonant tests used eight-talker babble or speech-shaped noise, so the two tasks were not identical. The loudspeaker position and participant posture differed between the speech-ABR and behavioral speech-in-noise tests. Only one hearing aid was fitted to one ear and the other ear was plugged, so the results may not reflect everyday binaural hearing aid use. The sample was adults aged 18 to 60 years with hearing loss not exceeding 70 dBHL in 250 to 2000 Hz in the better or aided ear, so it does not address infants, children, older adults, or more severe hearing loss.
Declared interests
Funding was named as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education, and King Fahad Medical City.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that speech-ABRs can replace behavioral hearing aid outcome tests. Aiding changed some brainstem responses, but the aided speech-ABR F0 encoding did not predict sentence or consonant recognition in noise or self-reported speech understanding.