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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.
Early Human Development
|December 15, 2010
Summary
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.
