Audição em alcoólicos: um estudo longitudinal

Abstract

This research had as objective to do a longitudinal study of the outside and central hearing the a group of adult and elderly alcoholic individuals. The basic hearing evaluation was composed by the tone threshold evaluation, speaking recognizing threshold, word recognition perentage index and Acoustic immittance measures. The hearing evaluation was composed by the Portuguese version of the SSW test (BORGES, 1997). The group was composed by 12 individuals with ages between 35 and 71 years, in the first evaluation and it was composed by the same individuals five years later, and it was applied the same evaluations again. These individuals consumption varied between six and 55 years, with stopping periods between zero and eleven years. These people signed the free permission term and answered the anamnese. After that they were submitted to the tests. The following variants were analysed: in relation to the basic hearing evaluation, we compared the results for pure sounds between two evaluations and for the SSW test, we verified the meaning values between the right competitive and the left competitive conditions. The results showed that non individual got better answers comparing the first and second evaluations, considering the age, the alcohol consumption and the tone thresholds. Only one individual showed a better result in the hearing evaluation, considering the stopping period of eleven years of alcohol consumption. After this study and considering the experimental conditions of it, we conclued that, in the study group, the alcohol has a great interference in adult and elderly´s hearing. The longer the alcohol consumption and the shorter the stopping period is, the bigger the damage to the outside and central hearing.