Sensitivity and specificity of a method for diagnosis of military noise-induced hearing loss

Abstract

Moore [(2020). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 148, 884-894] proposed a method for the diagnosis of hearing loss produced by noise exposure during military service (denoted M-NIHL) based on the audiogram. This letter characterizes the sensitivity and specificity of the method, based on 116 ears of men claiming compensation for M-NIHL and 244 ears of an age-matched non-noise-exposed control group of men screened to match the noise-exposed group in age, absence of conductive hearing loss, no history of ear diseases, and asymmetry across ears ≤10 dB. The sensitivity was 0.97 and the specificity was 0.67, giving a discriminability index d' of 2.3.