Objective: To assess the efficacy of intraoperative Brainstem Auditory Evoked Responses (BAER) in predicting postoperative hearing improvement in surgery for conductive hearing loss.
Study Design: Prospective study of consecutive patients undergoing surgery for conductive hearing loss under general anesthesia by a single surgeon.
Setting: Tertiary care university affiliated medical center.
Patients: All consenting patients undergoing surgery for conductive hearing loss by the senior author between June 25, 1993 and March 20, 1995.
Interventions: Pre- and post-reconstruction intraoperative BAERs; pre- and post-operative pure tone and speech audiometry.
Main outcome measures: Changes in audiometric puretone air-conduction thresholds, bone-air gaps, and Speech Reception Thresholds, compared with changes in BAER wave five (V) latencies.
Results: A decrease in the wave V latency on the intraoperative BAER correlates significantly with improvement in postoperative puretone air-conduction, bone-air gap, and SRT using chi-squared and linear regression analyses. Conclusions: Intraoperative BAER can reliably predict the success of an ossicular reconstruction under general anesthesia.