Abnormal peripheral auditory asymmetry in schizophrenia

Abstract

Objective-Auditory processing diYculties have been reported in schizophrenia. This study explores peripheral auditory function in patients with schizophrenia in whom certain early disturbances of auditory message filtering have been found and may be associated with certain abnormalities which are particularly localised in the left temporal lobe. Methods-Otoacoustic emissions, including click evoked and spontaneous emissions and measurements of functioning of the medial olivocochlear eVerent system were obtained from 12 chronic schizophrenic patients and compared with normative data recorded from 12 normal controls. Results-Otoacoustic emission amplitudes and medial olivocochlear functioning were similar between the normal controls and schizophrenic patients; the schizophrenic patients did, however, diVer from the normal controls in otoacoustic emission intensity and in medial olivocochlear asymmetry. A tendency to a higher number of spontaneous peaks, and a significantly higher click evoked otoacoustic emission response amplitude were found in the right ear compared with the left ear of schizophrenic patients. For the medial olivocochlear system, whereas normal controls showed greater attenuation in the right than in the left ear, schizophrenic patients lacked such an asymmetry. Conclusion-In the absence of any attention task, the findings show disturbed peripheral lateralisation in schizophrenia of mechanisms involved in auditory information filtering. Such a lack of right ear advantage in medial olivocochlear functioning may thus be a peripheral reflection of central lateralisation anomalies. (J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2001;70:88-94)

Contralateral Suppression of Otoacoustic Emissions in Children with Specific Language Impairment

“…Significant right-ear advantage of MOCS functioning, reported in the literature for some normalhearing adult populations (Khalfa & Collet, 1996;Veuillet et al, 2001) was not replicated here in either the control or the SLI group. It has been hypothesized that asymmetry of MOCS activity may be linked with more central asymmetry.…”

Effect of subject task on contralateral suppression of click evoked otoacoustic emissions

“…A greater contralateral suppression of EOAEs was found in musicians compared to nonmusicians Perrot et al, 1999) and reduced suppression has been reported in children with auditory processing disorders Sanches and Carvallo, 2006) and selective mutism (Bar-Haim et al, 2004). Moreover, most population studies have found a greater suppression in right than left ears (Khalfa and Collet, 1996;Khalfa et al, 1998), which has been suggested to be linked to the hemispheric asymmetry in sound processing (Morand-Villeneuve et al, 2005;Philibert et al, 1998), which may be altered in autism and schizophrenia (Khalfa et al, 2001a;Veuillet et al, 2001).…”

Activation of the caudal anterior cingulate cortex due to task‐related interference in an auditory Stroop paradigm

“…Among the different sensory modalities, the auditory modality is of particular interest for schizophrenia [Veuillet et al, 2001], because schizophrenia particularly affects auditory processing [Bentaleb et al, 2002]. While processing deficits of the visual domain are typically evoked by structural brain damages [Prigatano and Wong, 1999], auditory verbal hallucinations are one of the most characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia [David, 1999].…”

“…Abnormal conflict management was evidenced for several brain disorders, e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [for review see Lansbergen et al, 2007] or in paranoid schizophrenia [Nordahl et al, 2001]. An auditory approach to the common Stroop interference task seems of particular interest since the auditory sense is especially affected in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia [Veuillet et al, 2001]. Recently, it has been reported that an increased Stroop effect can serve as a marker for a genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia [e.g., Becker et al, 2008;Filbey et al, 2008].…”