Flashcards: Audiology

Cholesteatoma is a destructive and expanding growth consisting of keratinizing squamous epithelium in the middle ear and/or mastoid process.

Noise pollution or noise disturbance is the disturbing or excessive noise that may harm the activity or balance of human or animal life.

Hearing loss, also known as hearing impairment, is a partial or total inability to hear.

The auditory system is the sensory system for the sense of hearing.

A cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing in both ears; as of 2014 they had been used experimentally in some people who had acquired deafness in one ear after learning how to speak.

Hearing, auditory perception, or audition is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations, changes in the pressure of the surrounding medium through time, through an organ such as the ear.

Otitis media is a group of inflammatory diseases of the middle ear.

Audiometry (from Latin: audīre, "to hear" and metria, “to measure") is a branch of Audiology and the science of measuring hearing acuity for variations in sound intensity and pitch and for tonal purity, involving thresholds and differing frequencies.

Presbycusis (also spelled presbyacusis, from Greek presbys “old” + akousis “hearing”), or age-related hearing loss, is the cumulative effect of aging on hearing.

In human neuroanatomy, brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEPs), also called brainstem auditory evoked responses (BAERs), are very small auditory evoked potentials in response to an auditory stimulus, which are recorded by electrodes placed on the scalp.

Cortical deafness is a rare form of sensorineural hearing loss caused by damage to the primary auditory cortex.

The auditory brainstem response (ABR) is an auditory evoked potential extracted from ongoing electrical activity in the brain and recorded via electrodes placed on the scalp.

Various models of deafness are rooted in either the social or biological sciences.

Hyperacusis (also spelled hyperacousis) is a health condition characterized by an increased sensitivity to certain frequency and volume ranges of sound (a collapsed tolerance to usual environmental sound).

Auditory masking occurs when the perception of one sound is affected by the presence of another sound.

Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is a form of habituation therapy designed to help people who suffer from tinnitus, a ringing, buzzing, hissing, or other sound in the ears when no external sound is present.

The acoustic reflex (also known as the stapedius reflex, middle-ear-muscles (MEM) reflex, attenuation reflex, or auditory reflex) is an involuntary muscle contraction that occurs in the middle ear in response to high-intensity sound stimuli or when the person starts to vocalize.

Auditory processing disorder (APD), also known as central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), is an umbrella term for a variety of disorders that affect the way the brain processes auditory information.

The primary auditory cortex is the part of the temporal lobe that processes auditory information in humans and other vertebrates.

Pure tone audiometry (PTA) is the key hearing test used to identify hearing threshold levels of an individual, enabling determination of the degree, type and configuration of a hearing loss.