The significance of the negativities in the brainstem auditory evoked potential (BAEP)

This study was designed to investigate the negativities of the brainstem auditory evoked potential (BAEP), especially to determine if they represented a part of a composite waveform together with a given positivity. Subjects (10) and patients (56) provided the data, mainly in the form of correlation coefficients of latency and amplitude values, trace by trace comparisons of multiple responses from the same subject and the specific grouping of abnormal waves from the patient population. The results show that the strongest relationships of latency and amplitude involved completely different pairs of waves, that the negative and positive values often changed in opposite directions, and that no pair of waves of opposite polarity were typically abnormal together. Thus, the negativities are not generally associated with given positivities and likely have their own generators.