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Updated: Feb 4, 2026

Assessment and Communication for People with Disorders of Consciousness
Published on: August 1, 2017
Stapedial reflex threshold predicts individual loudness tolerance for people with autistic spectrum disorders
Yoshiyuki Ohmura1, Itsuki Ichikawa2, Shinichiro Kumagaya3
1Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan. ohmura@isi.imi.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
Abstract:
People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently show the symptoms of oversensitivity to sound (hyperacusis). Although the previous studies have investigated methods for quantifying hyperacusis in ASD, appropriate physiological signs for quantifying hyperacusis in ASD remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated the relationship of loudness tolerance with the threshold of the stapedial reflex and with contralateral suppression of the distortion product otoacoustic emissions, which has been suggested to be related to hyperacusis in people without ASD. We tested an ASD group and a neurotypical group. The results revealed that only the stapedial reflex threshold was significantly correlated with loudness tolerance in both groups. In addition to reduced loudness tolerance, people with lower stapedial reflex thresholds also exhibited higher scores on the Social Responsiveness Scale-2.
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