Bone conduction speech discrimination: an indication of cochlear function in the immediate postoperative period.

We illustrate that the apparent sensorineural audiometric changes immediately following stapedectomy are not indicative of a true sensorineural type hearing loss. The cochlear changes evident by postoperative pure-tone and air conduction speech discrimination audiometric tests are not reflective of the true cochlear reserve when the procedure of bone conduction speech discrimination is used. We report 25 consecutive stapedectomy cases in which most of the one-week postoperative audiograms of stapedectomized ears revealed a mid- and high-frequency sensorineural pure-tone loss and a drop in the standard speech discrimination scores. The decrease in speech discrimination, however, was not verified when using the bone-speech discrimination test, using maximum masking in the opposite ear.