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Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

Mismatch negativity (MMN), is a negative component in the auditory event-related potential. There has been increased interest in using the MMN as a clinical diagnostic tool be­cause it might provide an objective neural measure of auditory discrimin-ability. Auditory neuropathy (AN) is characterized by a paradoxical ab­sence of auditory brainstem evoked potentials with presence of otoacous-tic emissions, in patients whose pure-tone thresholds were slightly elevat­ed. The present study was designed to investigate the detectability of MMN in cochlear hearing loss and AN patients and to test the effectiveness of MMN as an indicator of auditory discrimination at cortical level, partic­ularly in patients with AN, if any. This study consisted of sixty subjects di­vided into three groups: (Group 1) 20 AN patients, (group 2) 20 patients with bilateral moderate SNHL of cochlear origin and (group 3) 20 normal peripheral hearing subjects. All partic­ipants were submitted to: full medical history, otoscopy, basic audiological evaluation, TEOAEs, ABR for neuro-otologic diagnosis and MMN testing. The results of the present study dem­onstrated that SNHL had a significant impact on the timing of the brain pro­cesses involved in the detection and discrimination of stimuli. Moreover, no significant differences were found be­tween AN patients and patients with cochlear hearing loss as far as MMN latencies.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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