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Updated: Jun 6, 2026
Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Perinatal cerebral insults alter auditory event-related potentials
Jaana A Leipälä1, Eino Partanen, Elena Kushnerenko
1National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), Finnish Office for Health Care Technology Assessment (FinOHTA), Helsinki, Finland.
Insights
Perinatal brain injuries, including intracerebral hemorrhage and asphyxia, alter auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) in infants, indicating impaired cortical auditory processing. These auditory processing changes were not linked to long-term developmental outcomes.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Pediatrics
- Auditory Neuroscience
Background:
- Auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) serve as key indicators of neural information processing.
- Previous studies have noted altered AERPs in individuals with frontal lobe injuries.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of perinatal brain injury on cortical auditory processing in infants.
- To test the hypothesis that perinatal insults affect auditory neural pathways.
Main Methods:
- AERPs were measured in preterm infants, term infants with perinatal intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), and term infants with perinatal asphyxia at multiple time points.
- Healthy preterm and term infants served as control groups.
- A harmonic tone paradigm was used, with standard and deviant stimuli, to assess auditory processing, and developmental outcomes were tracked until age two.
Main Results:
- Infants with term ICH and perinatal asphyxia exhibited significantly altered mismatch negativity (MMR) amplitudes compared to controls.
- The preterm ICH group did not show significant differences from their healthy preterm peers.
- MMR variability was observed across patient groups, but it did not correlate with adverse developmental outcomes.
Conclusions:
- Alterations in AERPs, specifically MMR, suggest that perinatal cerebral insults negatively impact cortical auditory processing in infants.
- These findings highlight the sensitivity of auditory pathways to early brain injury.
Background:
auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) can be used as indices of neural information processing. Altered AERPs have been reported in children and young adults with frontal lobe infarction.
Aim:
to test the hypothesis that perinatal brain injury affects cortical auditory processing.
Methods:
we assessed AERPs at term, 6 and 12months of age in preterm infants [n=9, median gestational age (GA) 27.9, range 23.9-30.0wk], term infants with perinatal intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) [n=5, GA 40.3, range 37.4-42.3wk], and term infants with perinatal asphyxia [n=4, GA 39.4, range 37.9-40.3wk]. Healthy preterm (n=16) and term infants (n=22) served as controls. A harmonic tone of 500-Hz frequency was used as standard and of 750-Hz as deviant stimulus. Mean AERP amplitudes were calculated over 100ms periods from 50 to 350ms. The developmental outcome was followed until 2years of age.
Results:
the term ICH (p=0.012) and asphyxia (p=0.0016) group had smaller or more negative responses to the deviant, resulting in smaller or more negative MMR amplitudes than those of the controls. The preterm ICH group did not differ significantly from their preterm born controls. MMR varied in all patient groups and was not associated with adverse outcome.
Conclusion:
AERP alterations suggest that perinatal cerebral insults affect cortical auditory processing.
