A preliminary study on auditory function in patientswith temporal lobe epilepsy

OBJECTIVE To assess auditoryfunction in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.METHODS 500Hz low-pass filtered speech test, puretone audiometry, ABR and acoustic immittance mea-surement were performed in 19 patients with temporallobe epilepsy ( including 10 patients with left temporallobe epilepsy and 9 patients with right temporal lobeepilepsy ) and 20 age-matched normal-hearing controls.All the patients with temporal lobe epilepsy were diag-nosed by the neurologists prior to the tests. RESULTSThere were no significant statistical differences in thethreshold of pure tone average and tympanometry be-tween the patients with temporal lobe epilepsy andnormal subjects (P 0.05). In ABR test, no significantdifferences were found in the latency of waves and theinterpeak latency intervals of waves between the groups(P 0.05). There were no significant statistical differ-ences in the discrimination score for unfiltered speechand 500Hz low-pass filtered speech between the pa-tients and the control group (P 0.05), but in differencebetween the unfiltered speech and low-pass filteredspeech discrimination score, the score in the group ofleft temporal lobe epilepsy patients right ear (69.7±12.3) %,left ear(67.1±10.3) % was higher than that inthe control group right ear(61.7±8.3)%, left ear (60.1±8.3) %. CONCLUSION The results showed thatsignificant auditory dysfunction was not found inpatients with temporal lobe epilepsy. But there was anupward trend in difference between the unfiltered speechand low-pass filtered speech discrimination scores inthe left temporal lobe epilepsy patients.