1996 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 130-134
Up to now, ABR has made a great contribution to the early diagnosis of child' hearing loss. Hewever, ABR cannot detect low frequency hearing loss because of click tone as a stimulus. We were able to perform nonsurgical EcochG in children to evaluate low tone inner ear function, which ABR could not detect, by using a new electrode (HN-5) developed by Nishida et al. (1994).
The subjects were 7 children (from 10 months to 2-years 6-months) whose ABR revealed poor or no response. They had relatively good response of CM at low frequencies even if ABR showed poor or no response. This would allow us to know whether or not the function of their inner hair cells has remained. Up until this time, there has never been a nonsurgical test to evaluate children's electro-physiologic phenomenon at low frequency. We expect that childrens' inner ear function can be evaluated by using thresholds of CM which have the character of frequency specificity in cochlea. Furthermore, we expect that the information contained in the CM from ECochG is useful for the fitting of hearing aids in children.
