Auditory brainstem response (ABR) to tone pips in hearing-impaired children

The correspondence between ABR thresholds to tone pips and behavioral thresholds at 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz was studied in 13 normal and 55 hearing-impaired children, including 42 sensori-neural losses and 13 conductive losses. The children's ages ranged from 1 year 3 months to 8 years. Tone pips were provided with 2-cycle rise-fall times and 2-cycle plateaus. The correlations between the two measures were highly significant at 3 frequencies both in sensori-neural losses and conductive losses. In the subjects with sensori-neural losses, the ABR thresholds tended to be lower than the behavioral thresholds. Mean threshold differences between the ABR and behavioral audiometry at each frequency in sensori-neural losses were 1.6, 0.26 and 5.8 dB, respectively. On the other hand, in the subjects with conductive losses, the ABR thresholds were higher than the behavioral ones by 9.6, 7.8 and 7.5 dB at respective frequencies. Therefore, the hearing acuity in young children with sensori-neural losses can be predicted with accuracy from the ABR thresholds to tone-pips at 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz.