Tinnitus is a prevalent complaint in otorhinolaryngology clinics. Its pathophysiology is multifactorial. The effect of tinnitus on sound localization is still unclear , which is essential for safety.
Objectives were to determine the effect of tinnitus on the ability to localize different sound stimuli with or without noise. As we compared localization error scores of tinnitus patients with those of matched controls.
Methods Two groups of subjects were studied, a tinnitus group (n=20) and a control group (n=20). All tinnitus subjects showed bilateral normal hearing up to 4000 Hz. all subjects underwent basic audiological evaluation using pure tone, speech audiometry. Tinnitus group performed pitch and loudness matches to either an external stimulus. Finally, all subjects underwent a sound localization test. The later was performed using six speakers to test the center of the frontal field in favorable and unfavorable conditions.
Subject was instructed to point to the direction of sound every time. An error score was calculated based on the difference between the subject's perceived sound speaker and the stimulating speaker.
Results: For both groups, there were significant differences between the total error scores for the different stimuli. The worst sound localization ability was for the 4000 Hz, followed by 250 Hz and the better ability was for the speech stimuli.
Conclusion: The participants with tinnitus exhibited diminished sound localization ability compared with sex-matched controls, and their performance worsened for speech localization in noisy conditions. Further studies with larger sample size across multiple demographic traits are necessary to confirm results.