The Effect of Advancing Age on Auditory Middle- and Long-Latency Evoked Potentials Using a Steady-State-Response Approach

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to objectively detect age-specific changes that occur in equivalent auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs), corresponding to transient middle- and long-latency auditory evoked potentials as a function of repetition rate and advancing age.

Method: The study included 48 healthy hearing adults who were equally divided into 3 groups by age: 20-39, 40-59, and 60-79 years. ASSRs were recorded at 7 repetition rates from 40 down to 0.75 Hz, elicited by trains of repeated tone burst stimuli.

Results: Temporal analysis of middle- and long-latency equivalent ASSRs revealed no appreciable changes in the magnitudes of the response across the age groups. Likewise, the spectral analysis revealed that advancing age did not substantially affect the spectral content of the response at each repetition rate. Furthermore, the harmonic sum was not significantly different across the 3 age groups, between the younger adults versus the combined Older Group Sample 1 and Sample 2, and between the two extreme age groups (i.e., 20-39 vs. 60-79) for the middle- and long-latency equivalent ASSRs.

Conclusion: Advancing age has no effect on the long-latency equivalent ASSRs; however, aging does affect the middle-latency equivalent ASSRs when the mean age difference is ≥ 40 years.