Abstract
Context
Hearing loss is the most important risk factor of tinnitus, but this relation is not straightforward; some patients with severe tinnitus have normal hearing, whereas many patients with hearing loss do not have tinnitus.
Aims
The aim was to determine if high frequency audiometry (HFA) may reveal significant differences between normal hearing participants with and without tinnitus.
Settings and design
This is a case–control study.
Participants and methods
HFA was done on two groups of participants with normal hearing sensitivity. The first group was composed of 20 adults with tinnitus, whereas the control group was 15 age-matched and sex-matched participants, not suffering from tinnitus.
Statistical analysis
Data were analyzed using SPSS software package version 20.0. Significance of the results was judged at the 5% level. χ2 with Fisher’s exact as a correction, Kruskal–Wallis, Mann–Whitney, and Pearson’s coefficient tests were used.
Results
HFA showed no significant difference between the two studied groups.
Conclusion
Tinnitus in normal hearing participants does not necessarily indicate corresponding damage in the cochlea
Article PDF
References
Ahlf S, Tziridis K, Korn S, Strohmeyer I, Schulze H. Predisposition for and prevention of subjective tinnitus development. PLoS One 2012; 7:e44519.
Kim DK, Park SN, Kim HM, Son HR, Kim NG, Park KH, et al. Prevalence and significance of high-frequency hearing loss in subjectively normal-hearing patients with tinnitus. Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol 2011; 120:523–528.
Konig O, Schaette R, Kempter R, Gross M. Course of hearing loss and occurrence of tinnitus. Hear Res 2006; 221:59–64.
Martines F, Bentivegna D, Martines E, Sciacca V, Martinciglio G. Assessing audiological, pathophysiological and psychological variables in tinnitus patients with or without hearing loss. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 2010; 267:1685–1693.
Norena A, Micheyl C, Chery-Croze S, Collet L. Psychoacoustic characterization of the tinnitus spectrum: implications for the underlying mechanisms of tinnitus. Audiol Neurootol 2002; 7:358–369.
Schecklmann M, Vielsmeier V, Steffens T, Landgrebe M, Langguth B, Kleinjung T. Relationship between Audiometric slope and tinnitus pitch in tinnitus patients: insights into the mechanisms of tinnitus generation. PLoS One 2012; 7:e34878.
Schaette R, McAlpine D. Tinnitus with a normal audiogram: physiological evidence for hidden hearing loss and computational model. J Neurosci 2011; 31:13452–13457.
Rodriguez Valiente A, Trinidad A, Garcia Berrocal JR, Gorriz C, Ramirez Camacho R. Extended high-frequency (9–20 kHz) audiometry reference thresholds in 645 healthy subjects. Int J Audiol 2014; 53:531–545.
Best V, Carlile S, Jin C, van Schaik A. The role of high frequencies in speech localization. J Acoust Soc Am 2005; 118:353–363.
Rodriguez Valiente A, Perez Sanz C, Gorriz C, Juarez A, Monfort M, Garcia Berrocal JR, et al. Designing a new tool for hearing exploration. Acta Otorrinolaringol Esp 2009; 60:43–48.
Weisz N, Muller S, Schlee W, Dohrmann K, Hartmann T, Elbert T. The neural code of auditory phantom perception. J Neurosci 2007; 27:1479–1484.
Fabijanska A, Smurzynski J, Hatzopoulos S, Kochanek K, Bartnik G, Raj-Koziak D, et al. The relationship between distortion product otoacoustic emissions and extended high-frequency audiometry in tinnitus patients. Part 1: normally hearing patients with unilateral tinnitus. Med Sci Monit 2012; 18:765–770.
Kaltenbach JA, Zhang J, Finlayson P. Tinnitus as a plastic phenomenon and its possible neural underpinnings in the dorsal cochlear nucleus. Hear Res 2005; 206:200–226.
Saunders JC. The role of central nervous system plasticity in tinnitus. J Commun Disord 2007; 40:313–334.
American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Methods for manual puretone thresholds audiometry. New York: ANSI; 2004.
Goldstein B, Shulman A. Tinnitus evaluation. In Shulman A, Aran J, Tonndorf J, Feldman H, Vernon JA, editors. Tinnitus: diagnosis/ treatment. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group, Inc 1997. 293–318
Henry JA, Meikle MB. Psychoacoustic measures of tinnitus. J Am Acad Audiol 2000; 11:138–155.
Kirkpatrick LA, Feeney BC. A simple guide to IBM SPSS statistics for version 20.0. Student ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning 2013.
Kotz S, Balakrishnan N, Read CB, Vidakovic B. Encyclopedia of statistical sciences. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley-Interscience 2006.
Nondahl DM, Cruickshanks KJ, Huang GH, Klein BE, Klein R, Nieto FJ, et al. Tinnitus and its risk factors in the Beaver Dam offspring study. Int J Audiol 2011; 50:313–320.
Davis A, El Rafaie A. Epidemiology of tinnitus. In: Tyler RS, editor. Tinnitus handbook. San Diego: Singular, Thomson Learning; 2000. 1–23
Frank T. High-frequency hearing thresholds in young adults using a commercially available audiometer. Ear Hear 1990; 11:450–454.
Wiley TL, Cruickshanks KJ, Nondahl DM, Tweed TS, Klein R, Klein R, et al. Aging and high-frequency hearing sensitivity. J Speech Lang Hear Res 1998; 41:1061–1072.
Barnea G, Attias J, Gold S, Shahar A. Tinnitus with normal hearing sensitivity: extended high-frequency audiometry and auditory-nerve brain-stem-evoked responses. Audiology 1990; 29:36–45.
Shim HJ, Kim SK, Park CH, Lee SH, Yoon SW, Ki AR, et al. Hearing abilities at ultra-high frequency in patients with tinnitus. Clin Exp Otorhinolaryngol 2009; 2:169–174.
Henry JA, Dennis KC, Schechter MA. General review of tinnitus: prevalence, mechanisms, effects, and management. J Speech Lang Hear Res 2005; 48:1204–1235.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
Rights and permissions
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Elmoazen, D.M., Kozou, H.S. & Mohamed, A.A. High frequency audiometry in tinnitus patients with normal hearing in conventional audiometry. Egypt J Otolaryngol 34, 308–315 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4103/ejo.ejo_44_18
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4103/ejo.ejo_44_18