Search

Six subjects who developed individually significant auditory deprivation effects associated with monaural amplification were tracked for 6.2 to 15.1 years from the time of their initial hearing aid fitting. Each subject received binaural hearing aids after the auditory deprivation effect became apparent and used binaural amplification for at least 4 years. The findings corroborate and expand upon existing case reports. Several general configurations of recovery and no recovery following the introduction of binaural amplification were identified: (1) cases in which auditory deprivation effects developed within about 2 years and recovered completely within about 2 years of binaural use; (2) cases with significant but incomplete recovery; and (3) cases in which the auditory deprivation effect took several years to develop and did not recover following several years of binaural amplification. Clinical implications of the results are proposed.

This study addressed the issue of whether functional impairments can be identified or confirmed using tonal acoustic reflex thresholds (ARTs). Tonal ARTs from 74 ears with functional impairments were compared to 10th percentiles of the ARTs for normal and cochlear-impaired ears at 500 to 2000 Hz (Gelfand, Schwander, and Silman, 1990). Only one ear (5.3%) was correctly identified among the 19 ears in which all of the voluntary thresholds at 500 to 2000 Hz were < or = 55 dB HL. Acoustic reflex thresholds correctly identified functional losses in 70.9 percent, 78.6 percent, and 85.7 percent of the ears with voluntary thresholds > or = 60 dB HL at one, two, or three of these frequencies, respectively. The false positive rate was only 5 to 7 percent for a control group of 50 ears with genuine sensorineural hearing losses. The results indicate that tonal ARTs are an effective nonbehavioral tool for identifying or substantiating the presence of functional losses when thresholds are > or = 60 dB HL; however, ARTs cannot identify functional components when thresholds are < or = 55 dB HL.

This study investigated the effects of monaural versus binaural amplification upon the speech recognition scores (SRSs) of children with bilateral moderate sensorineural hearing loss after more than 4 years of hearing aid use. There was a significant decrease in SRSs for the unaided ears of the monaural hearing aid users, but there were no significant differences between initial and retest SRSs for their aided ears, or for both ears of those using binaural amplification. The SRS reduction was found to be large enough to be significant on an individual ear basis (by exceeding 95% confidence limits of the binomial model) in five of the ten unaided ears of the monaurally fitted children, but this did not occur for any of the initial-retest SRS differences in the aided ears of either group. These findings demonstrate that the auditory deprivation effect, which has been reported for adults using monaural hearing aids, is also found in children.

Adult-onset auditory deprivation following prolonged lack of amplification in the unaided ears of persons with bilaterally symmetrical sensorineural hearing impairment was first reported in 1984. This article on the phenomenon includes a review of the literature on adult-onset auditory deprivation in relation to etiology, pathophysiology, hearing-loss manifestations, typical audiologic profile, amplification strategies, contraindications or challenges to conventional hearing-aid fitting, and future research. A case study illustrates the phenomenon of auditory deprivation from monaural amplification with recovery following binaural amplification. The results of a complete audiologic and acoustic-immittance evaluation are presented for a bilaterally sensorineural hearing-impaired male with adult-onset auditory deprivation who initially was fit monaurally and later was fit binaurally. A significant decrement in the suprathreshold word-recognition scores occurred only in the unaided ear following monaural amplification, illustrating the phenomenon of adult-onset auditory deprivation. Following binaural amplification, the suprathreshold word-recognition scores for the formerly unaided ear improved significantly, illustrating the phenomenon of recovery from the adult-onset auditory deprivation with binaural amplification.