Diagnostic Markers of Tone Burst Evoked Auditory Brainstem Response in Adults

Abstract

The auditory brainstem response (ABR) is a useful electrophysiological technique for assessing hearing sensitivity in patients whose age or handicaps rule out the use of conventional behavioral audiometric techniques. Tone burst ABR has great role to play as it offers frequency specific responses over that of click evoked ABR. To use tone-burst ABRs for site of lesion testing, it is necessary to have separate normative of absolute latency, inter-wave intervals, and amplitude ratio. The above study was taken up to find out the normative values of various parameters of tone burst ABR. Hundred adults with normal hearing were tested using tone burst stimuli to find out values of various parameters. It was found that all the parameters absolute latency, inter-wave latency differences, amplitude ratio differed in terms of their mean values from those with click evoked ABR. Findings of the present study will be useful as a normative and any deviation from these can be considered as being disordered.