Estimated Prevalence of Functional Hearing Difficulties in Blast-Exposed Service Members With Normal to Near–Normal-Hearing Thresholds

Conclusions: These elevated rates of abnormal performance suggest that roughly 33.6% of Active-Duty service members (or approximately 423,000) with normal to near–normal-hearing thresholds (i.e., H1 profile) are at some risk for FHCD, and about 5.7% (approximately 72,000) are at high risk, but are currently untested and undetected within the current fitness-for-duty standards. Service members identified as “at risk” for FHCD according to the metrics used in the present study, in spite of their excellent hearing thresholds, require further testing to determine whether they have sustained damage to peripheral and early-stage auditory processing (bottom-up processing), damage to cognitive processes for speech (top-down processing), or both. Understanding the extent of damage due to noise and blast exposures and the balance between bottom-up processing deficits and top-down deficits will likely lead to better therapeutic strategies.
Source: Ear and Hearing - Category: Audiology Tags: Research Article Source Type: research