Estímulos CE-chirp® e narrow band CE-chirps® na avaliação eletrofisiológica da audição: resultados clínicos em neonatos, lactentes e crianças

Abstract

The auditory steady-state response (ASSR) has been suggested as an alternative to the auditory brainstem response (ABR) to estimate the hearing threshold in children who are unable to carry out the tests with conditioned behavioral hearing procedures. The purpose of this study was to verify the applicability of ASSR to estimate the hearing thresholds in children with sensorineural hearing loss, comparing them to other procedures available for this assessment. The study included 15 children ages between 2 months and 3 years old, with sensorineural hearing loss. The ASSR obtained in 1, 2 and 4 kHz were compared with click ABR; the ASSR at 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 kHz were compared with the tone-ABR and with the visual reinforcement audiometry (VRA). The results showed good concordance between the ASSR at high frequencies with the responses of click ABR (0.63 - 0.70), being the best correlation for 1 kHz (0.70). When compared to tone-ABR it could be seen good concordance between the techniques, with coefficients of 0.77, 0.60, 0.66 and 0.50 for the frequencies of 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 kHz. However, the best coefficients were comparing the ASSR with the VRA (0.89 - 0.93), indicating strong correlation between the techniques. The results showed that when compared to other procedures available to estimate the hearing, the ASSR provided similar findings, proving to be a viable technique in order to estimate the hearing thresholds in a child when the VRA may not be possible