Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025 Jan-Feb;46(1):60-70.
doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000001555. Epub 2024 Jul 15.

The Influence of Asymmetric Hearing Loss on Peripheral and Central Auditory Processing Abilities in Patients With Vestibular Schwannoma

Veronika Svobodová  1   2 , Oliver Profant  1   3 , Josef Syka  1   4 , Diana Tóthová  1   2 , Zbyněk Bureš  3   5
Affiliations

The Influence of Asymmetric Hearing Loss on Peripheral and Central Auditory Processing Abilities in Patients With Vestibular Schwannoma

Veronika Svobodová et al. Ear Hear. 2025 Jan-Feb.

Abstract

Objectives: Asymmetric or unilateral hearing loss (AHL) may cause irreversible changes in the processing of acoustic signals in the auditory system. We aim to provide a comprehensive view of the auditory processing abilities for subjects with acquired AHL, and to examine the influence of AHL on speech perception under difficult conditions, and on auditory temporal and intensity processing.

Design: We examined peripheral and central auditory functions for 25 subjects with AHL resulting from vestibular schwannoma, and compared them to those from 24 normal-hearing controls that were matched with the AHL subjects in mean age and hearing thresholds in the healthy ear. Besides the basic hearing threshold assessment, the tests comprised the detection of tones and gaps in a continuous noise, comprehension of speech in babble noise, binaural interactions, difference limen of intensity, and detection of frequency modulation. For the AHL subjects, the selected tests were performed separately for the healthy and diseased ear.

Results: We observed that binaural speech comprehension, gap detection, and frequency modulation detection abilities were dominated by the healthy ear and were comparable for both groups. The AHL subjects were less sensitive to interaural delays, however, they exhibited a higher sensitivity to sound level, as indicated by lower difference limen of intensity and a higher sensitivity to interaural intensity difference. Correlations between the individual test scores indicated that speech comprehension by the AHL subjects was associated with different auditory processing mechanisms than for the control subjects.

Conclusions: The data suggest that AHL influences both peripheral and central auditory processing abilities and that speech comprehension under difficult conditions relies on different mechanisms for the AHL subjects than for normal-hearing controls.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

References

    1. Bellis T. J., Nicol T., Kraus N. (2000). Aging affects hemispheric asymmetry in the neural representation of speech sounds. J Neurosci, 20, 791–797.
    1. Brown A., Early S., Vasilijic S., Stankovic K. M. (2022). Sporadic vestibular schwannoma size and location do not correlate with the severity of hearing loss at initial presentation. Front Oncol, 12, 836504.
    1. Bureš Z., Popelář J., Syka J. (2017). The effect of noise exposure during the developmental period on the function of the auditory system. Hear Res, 352, 1–11.
    1. Bureš Z., Profant O., Svobodová V., Tóthová D., Vencovský V., Syka J. (2019). Speech comprehension and its relation to other auditory parameters in elderly patients with tinnitus. Front Aging Neurosci, 11, 219.
    1. Bureš Z., Pysanenko K., Syka J. (2021). Age-related changes in the temporal processing of acoustical signals in the auditory cortex of rats. Hear Res, 402, 108025.