Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Hallym University College of Medicine, Chuncheon, Republic of Korea.
Laboratory of Brain & Cognitive Sciences for Convergence Medicine, Hallym University College of Medicine, Anyang, Republic of Korea.
Audiol Neurootol. 2021;26(4):218-225. doi: 10.1159/000510694. Epub 2020 Dec 18.
The hearing process involves complex peripheral and central auditory pathways and could be influenced by various situations or medications. To date, there is very little known about the effects of alcohol on the auditory performances. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate how acute alcohol administration affects various aspects of hearing performance in human subjects, from the auditory perceptive threshold to the speech-in-noise task, which is cognitively demanding.
A total of 43 healthy volunteers were recruited, and each of the participants received calculated amounts of alcohol according to their body weight and sex with a targeted blood alcohol content level of 0.05% using the Widmark formula. Hearing was tested in alcohol-free conditions (no alcohol intake within the previous 24 h) and acute alcohol conditions. A test battery composed of pure-tone audiometry, speech reception threshold (SRT), word recognition score (WRS), distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE), gaps-in-noise (GIN) test, and Korean matrix sentence test (testing speech perception in noise) was performed in the 2 conditions.
Acute alcohol intake elevated pure-tone hearing thresholds and SRT but did not affect WRS. Both otoacoustic emissions recorded with DPOAE and the temporal resolution measured with the GIN test were not influenced by alcohol intake. The hearing performance in a noisy environment in both easy (-2 dB signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]) and difficult (-8 dB SNR) conditions was decreased by alcohol.
Acute alcohol elevated auditory perceptive thresholds and affected performance in complex and difficult auditory tasks rather than simple tasks.
听觉过程涉及复杂的外周和中枢听觉通路，可能受到各种情况或药物的影响。迄今为止，人们对酒精对听觉表现的影响知之甚少。本研究的目的是评估急性酒精给药如何影响人类受试者从听觉感知阈值到认知要求较高的言语噪声任务的各种听力表现。
共招募了 43 名健康志愿者，根据体重和性别，按照 Widmark 公式，每位参与者摄入计算出的酒精量，使目标血液酒精含量达到 0.05%。在无酒精条件（前 24 小时内未摄入酒精）和急性酒精条件下测试听力。测试电池由纯音测听、言语接受阈（SRT）、言语识别率（WRS）、畸变产物耳声发射（DPOAE）、噪声中间隙测试（GIN 测试）和韩国矩阵句子测试（测试噪声中的言语感知）组成，在这两种条件下进行。
急性酒精摄入可升高纯音听阈和 SRT，但不影响 WRS。用 DPOAE 记录的两种耳声发射和用 GIN 测试测量的时间分辨率均不受酒精摄入的影响。在易（-2 dB 信噪比 [SNR]）和难（-8 dB SNR）两种噪声环境下，听力表现均因酒精而下降。
急性酒精可升高听觉感知阈值，并影响复杂和困难的听觉任务的表现，而不是简单的任务。
