Acute Alcohol Intake Deteriorates Hearing Thresholds and Speech Perception in Noise

Abstract

<b><i>Objectives:</i></b> 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. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> 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. <b><i>Results:</i></b> 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. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Acute alcohol elevated auditory perceptive thresholds and affected performance in complex and difficult auditory tasks rather than simple tasks.