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Abstract
A cochlear dead region (CDR), as explained by Moore, is an area of the cochlear partition where the inner hair cells are absent or completely non-functioning. It could explain some failures in hearing aid users in terms of speech intelligibility. The TEN (threshold-equalizing noise) test and PTC (psychophysics tuning curves) are the methods used at present to diagnose CDR. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the TEN-test results in a consecutive series of patients, selected by quite wide criteria and, in particular, to evaluate whether or not difficulties could arise in interpreting the results. Data were collected from 28 hearing impaired subjects with moderate to profound sensorineural hearing loss and from 10 normally hearing subjects (control group). The results showed 21 audiograms which did not meet the criterion to have CDR and seven audiograms suspected to present CDR. The TEN-test could be easily conducted by applying procedures common in clinical audiometry. Stimulus calibration should be somewhat improved to allow easy compensation of the acoustic variables due to different instrument settings. Our experience suggested that the clinical perspective of the CDR concept has still to be clearly defined, since it remains unclear whether, and to what extent this figure may be associated with precise perceptual disorders. Key words: Cochlear dead region, TEN-test, off-frequency listening.