Abstract
Auditory Synaptopathy and Masking Psychometric Function Slope: A Conjecture
Highlights
Research ArticleMutualidad Argentina de Hipoacúsicos, Buenos Aires, Argentina hc, Argentina Submission: September 05, 2018; Published: September 17, 2018 *Corresponding author: Horacio E Cristiani, Mutualidad Argentina de Hipoacúsicos, Argentina, Tel: +541143709616; Email: Abstract
From the revealing work of [1], which showed the existence of “hidden” hearing losses, a change in the auditory system as a result of the damage at the synapses between the inner hair cells (IHC) and the fibers of the auditory nerve (ANF) called Synaptopathy a great amount of effort was generated looking for confirmation of its existence in humans and to estimate the perceptual effects that this type of dysfunction could cause [24]
The conjecture presented here suggests that the failure in low spontaneous and high threshold neurons should be appreciated in the variation of the slope of the psychometric function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) obtained at a high level, compared with the slope of the same function obtained at low level
Summary
Mutualidad Argentina de Hipoacúsicos, Buenos Aires, Argentina hc, Argentina Submission: September 05, 2018; Published: September 17, 2018 *Corresponding author: Horacio E Cristiani, Mutualidad Argentina de Hipoacúsicos, Argentina, Tel: +541143709616; Email: Abstract. Studies were proposed to confirm this result in humans and estimate the perceptual effects that this type of dysfunction (called Hidden Hearing Loss) could cause. The decrease in the number of synapses would mainly affect the neurons of high threshold and low spontaneous firing rate, being less affected the low threshold and high spontaneous firing rate. The effect of this type of loss should be detected in situations of speech detection with background noise, in particular with high levels of such noise. A summary is presented with some of the previous knowledge on auditory synaptopathy and a rationale about a method to detect these hidden losses in subjects with normal hearing and hearing impaired is conjectured.
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