Selective deficits in a clinical population with self-reported hearing difficulties but normal audiometric thresholds

Abstract

Audiologists often encounter patients who report hearing difficulties despite having normal audiometric thresholds. Many of these patients are told that they have normal hearing, although it is possible that the current typical audiometric test battery is not sensitive to these hearing difficulties. A test battery including immittance testing, binaural listening tasks, cognitive testing and subjective questionnaires of speech understanding, spatial hearing, and annual noise exposure was administered to 26 patients (age range: 18–53 years) who had sought out audiologic assessment at a community clinic but had normal hearing sensitivity. Despite normal hearing sensitivity, the participants in the study exhibited deficits in several binaural listening tasks, weakened middle-ear muscle reflexes, and rated their speech understanding and spatial hearing as being significantly worse than a normative population with normal hearing sensitivity. This patient group did not perform significantly worse on any of the cognitive measures nor did they report significantly more noise exposure than a normative young adult population; however, nearly two-thirds of participants were classified as “high risk” for noise exposure. These findings confirm self-reported hearing difficulties reported by this audiometrically “normal” population and suggest that several of the measures used in this study should be considered for standard audiologic evaluation.