Abstract
We compared the threshold of auditory brainstem response (ABR) with that of pure tone audiometry on 129 children (67 boys and 62 girls). ABR was administered to the subjects between the age of 1 month and 12 years old, and the pure tone audiometry between 2 years and 12 years old. In ABR, clicks of 0.2 milliseconds in duration were used. The results showed that there was a high correlation (r=.92) between the threshold of ABR and the pure tone audiometry in the speech frequencies. The types of hearing losses did not affect the results. Also, no differences in the correlation was found among the different age groups. In the patients with sensorineural hearing loss in the low tones, differences were observed between ABR and the pure tone audiometry: one such case was described in this paper. Therefore, it is suggested that clinicians should follow up the children who were tested with ABR until conditioned orientation response audiometry (COR) or pure tone audiometry can be performed. We also studied the patient group with no response in ABR (at 106 dBnHL). While most of them were determined as having a severe hearing loss in the pure tone audiometry, 58% of them were under 100-110 dBHL, for whom utilizing hearing ability may be expected. Clinicians, therefore, must be careful in giving information and fitting hearing aids especially for those children with hearing loss at the level of no response in ABR.
