Comments on the relations between auditory fatigue and iris pigmentation.

Abstract

It has been reported that subjects with highly pigmented irises (brown) experience significantly less temporary threshold shift (TTS) than subjects with less pigmented irises (blue), and that those with green-gray pigmentation display intermediate amounts of TTS. TOTA and BOCCI noted the high correlation between the melanin content in the stria vascularis and that found in the pigmentation of the iris; they attributed their TTS differences across eye colour to the protective effects of melanin. TTS data are reported in this paper as a function of eye colour for exposure stimulus parameters almost identical to those used by TOTA and BOCCI (1 000 HZ at 110 dB SPL for 3 min). The present results do not support the hypothesis that individuals with highly pigmented irises (brown-eyed) are more resistant to auditory fatigue than those with less pigmentation of the iris (blue-eyed). Median TTS at 20 sec post-exposure among brown, green-gray, and blue iris categories did not differ by more than 1.8 dB, and the median TTS at 2 min post-exposure among those iris categories did not differ by more than 0.2 dB.