6 The test has been used in large-scale trials of approximately 15 000 people 7 and is continually recommended clinically as a simple test of hearing ability.
Therefore, routine diagnostic testing for hearing impairment of elderly patients with COPD do not provide benefits which go beyond possible benefits of screening for hearing loss in the general population in elderly patients.
The tests measured range of hearing over low, mid and high noise frequencies.
Given the importance of noninvasive biomarkers and the easy access of hearing tests, the symptom of hearing loss in HD patients may serve as a useful clinical indicator of disease onset and progression of HD.
By testing the age cohort correlation of hearing loss in the COPD and control groups, we calculated the Pearson correlation coefficients of medium strength (0.56, 0.61, p value<0.001) in the COPD and control groups, respectively.
However, commercially available tests of hearing in noise do not allow for speech perception evaluation with a variety of signals, noise types, signal and noise locations, and reverberation.
8 It is the only test of hearing that requires no equipment at all.
Despite its drawbacks, WVT remains the only test of hearing that needs no equipment and can therefore be used in many circumstances where other hearing tests would be unwelcome.
The importance is that if experience does not affect sensitivity and specificity, then WVT could become a more viable screening tool, especially in resource-limited or equipment-limited situations where a simple, fast test of hearing is needed.
Although fMRI cannot replace brainstem auditory evoked responses as an objective test of hearing, it has the potential to become an additional diagnostic tool for the clinical evaluation of the auditory function of dogs.
