Prevalence of cochlear dead regions in hearing-impaired patients

Abstract

Objective: The aim is to study the prevalence of dead regions in the cochlea in hearing-impaired patients with different audiometric configurations and to study the speech discrimination scores in dead regions of the cochlea. Materials and Methods: Eighty participants, with age ranging from 18 to 50 years, were divided into control group (30 normal-hearing participants) and study group (50 patients suffering from sensorineural hearing loss). All participants in the study were submitted to the following: medical and audiological history, otological examination, basic audiological evaluation in the form of pure-tone audiometry and tympanometry, auditory brainstem response, and the threshold-equalizing noise (TEN) test. Results: Thirty-nine patients in the study group gave negative results of TEN test and 11 patients gave positive results of TEN test. Conclusions: The prevalence of dead regions of the cochlea in this study was 22%. Dead regions in the cochlea were more common in patients with sloping, long-standing hearing loss and in high frequencies.