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The Variability in Potential Biomarkers for Cochlear Synaptopathy After Recreational Noise Exposure
Tine Vande Maele1, Sarineh Keshishzadeh2, Nele De Poortere1
1Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium.
Purpose:
Speech-in-noise tests and suprathreshold auditory evoked potentials are promising biomarkers to diagnose cochlear synaptopathy (CS) in humans. This study investigated whether these biomarkers changed after recreational noise exposure.
Method:
The baseline auditory status of 19 normal-hearing young adults was analyzed using questionnaires, pure-tone audiometry, speech audiometry, and auditory evoked potentials. Nineteen subjects attended a music festival and completed the same tests again at Day 1, Day 3, and Day 5 after the music festival.
Results:
No significant relations were found between lifetime noise-exposure history and the hearing tests. Changes in biomarkers from the first session to the follow-up sessions were nonsignificant, except for speech audiometry, which showed a significant learning effect (performance improvement).
Conclusions:
Despite the individual variability in prefestival biomarkers, we did not observe changes related to the noise-exposure dose caused by the attended event. This can indicate the absence of noise exposure-driven CS in the study cohort, or reflect that biomarkers were not sensitive enough to detect mild CS. Future research should include a more diverse study cohort, dosimetry, and results from test-retest reliability studies to provide more insight into the relationship between recreational noise exposure and CS. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16821283.
