Distortion-product otoacoustic emission fine structure

Abstract

Whether the auditory periphery is mature at birth and when it starts to decline with age is still unanswered questions in humans. Today, technological advances allow greater accuracy in the study of changes in cochlear physiology, especially at high frequencies, which would have a greater impact on signal the first effects of age. A recent study evaluated individuals aged 10 to 65 at a frequency of 0.75 Hz to 16 kHz (Poling et al., 2014) however, study including newborns analyzed the DPOAE only to 8kHz (Abdala and Dhar, 2012). However there are few works with the child population. I intend to contribute to the characterization of the behavior of DPOAE fine structure in a group of individuals with normal hearing, aged 0 to 10, with and without auditory risk factors with extended F2 frequencies up to 16 kHz. For this is required a training abroad. This training will follow the same research protocol for being applied in the future in population from 0 to 10 years, when returning to Brasil. Thus the aim of this research abroad is to analyze the distortion-product otoacoustic emission fine structure according to age in normal hearing adults. DPOAE will be measured in 100 human subjects aged between 18 and 45 years with clinically normal-hearing in the prof. Dhar lab with the protocol described by their research team (Poling et al., 2014). The equipment (Etymotic Research ER10X; RME UCX; Macintosh computer) and the technical support infrastructure to develop the project is available in Northwestern University The hypothesis of this project is that the results could help to understand the cochlear function according to age. Also is expected that the researcher could be trained to continue this research in Brazil. (AU)