Comparative Study on the Combined Examination with ABR and SVR, and Pure Tone Audiometry in Hearing Impaired Children

Statistics of Long Term Follow up

Abstract

In order to obtain the accurate predictive audiograms of young children, we have tried the combined examination with ABR and SVR for hearing impaired children, and discussed the confidence of this examination based on 33 cases with a long-term follow up.
We used ABR for 1, 2, 4, KHz with tone pips, and SVR for 0.5kHz with tone bursts. Compairing the threshold of ABR and SVR examination and that of pure tone audiometry after some years, there was a high correlation in each frequency.
Though ABR is very useful examination for hearing impaired children, it was reported that the greatest error was observed in some cases with steeply sloping audiograms. On the other hand SVR has weak points such as false positive dicision, but this statistics showed a high correlation to pure tone audiometry. We concluded that SVR was an effective examination in low frequencies if careful dicisions and good conditions was made, and emphasized that the combining ABR and SVR made ERA examination more thorough and accurate.