Relations among early postexposure noise-induced threshold shifts and permanent threshold shifts in the chinchilla

Threshold shifts (TS) were measured at various times following a wide variety of noise exposures on over 900 chinchillas. An analysis of postexposure TS measures and noise-induced permanent threshold shift (PTS) showed that, across audiometric test frequency, there was a consistent relation between these variables of the form PTS (dB) = alpha(e(TS/beta) - 1), where, for a given test frequency, alpha (dB) and beta (dB) are constants. TSs were measured immediately following exposure (TS0), 24 h after exposure (TS24), and at several intermediate times in order to estimate the maximum TS (TSmax). Correlation between TS and PTS at the various test frequencies was highest for TS24. An analysis of the 90th-percentile PTS showed a linear growth of PTS with TS24 of approximately 0.7 dB PTS/dB TS24. These data provide some support, in the chinchilla model, for a variation of the three postulates originally presented by Kryter et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 39, 451 (1966)]. Specifically: (i) TS24 is a consistent measure of the effects of a traumatic noise exposure. (ii) All exposures that produce a given TS24 will be equally hazardous. (iii) Noise-induced PTS in the most susceptible animals, following many years of exposure, is approximately equal to (0.7)TS24 measured after an 8-h exposure to the same noise.