What was your post-treatment audiogram like? Mine is shown.

[jw]

I thought it might be interesting to compare post-treatment audiograms.  Mine is shown here:

The one on the left I stole from the internet.  It shows unilateral hearing loss in an acoustic neuroma patient.  My audiogram (going from memory) is on the right.  As you can see, my 'red' ear is perfect with minimal loss in the high frequencies.  My 'blue' ear drops rapidly and almost down to nothing with a slight increase at the end.

My question:  if a unilateral hearing loss is a symptom of AN, and the one on the left shows a typical one, what does mine suggest?  Not only is my opposite ear perfect, my bad ear shows an even wider spread.  The audiologist says that there is such a significant difference between the ears that he's strongly suspicious of AN. 

My wife, on the other hand, says there's very little between my ears.  I wonder if she's talking about my audiogram?? 

Anyway, I'm curious to compare charts.  If you can do an image and you don't have anywhere to host it, I would be happy to do so for you.


John

[Mark]

Hi John,

That's interesting how you posted the two graphs, very cool. I'm not sure what the source of the one on the left is but here is my take on your question.

The non AN ear hearing is obviously the left ear and the diagram on the right of yours probably reflects 90% of us. At least it looks just like mine with perfect hearing across all frequency's. In terms of the one on the left there is no reason why the red line should have drop off related to having an AN. I believe this represents someone who has naturally lost some high range frequency for some other reason. It could be someone older, someone who worked in a loud industrial occupation or just plain listened to rock music too loud. Boy, how many of us have heard those lame explanations from ENT's before our AN was diagnosed 

The blue hearing line shows a classic drop off of high frequency range associated with an AN. For me , the one on the left is almost exactly what mine looks like before and after treatment with the drop to about the 60db level. Obviously, the steeper the drop the less usable hearing is usually the result. The speech recognition threshold ( SRT) is the most common measurement of that aspect. I've never seen a comparison of the two, but I assume they move fairly closely together.

Mark