Objective: The purpose of study was identify hearing loss in thalassemic patients with history of Desferrioxamine (DFO) therapy. This study was carried out in a cross-sectional descriptive survey on 195 thalassemic patients (3-30 years old) in Gazvin Thalassemia center and Tehran pediatrics&apos medical center.
Methods: The patients underwent routine otolaryngologic history and physical examination, along with standard pure-tone audiometry.
Results: Hearing loss was present in 43.1% of patients. 16% of patients had conductive hearing loss and 4.6% of patient had sensory neural hearing loss. 22.5% of thalassemic patients had high-frequency sensory neural hearing loss and more importantly, high-frequency hearing loss attributable to Desferrioxamine ototoxicity was present in 12% of patients. Furthermore, these evaluations showed that there is a significant relationship between hearing loss and DFO usage and hearing loss too. There is no significant relationship between hearing loss and ferritin level between hearing loss and age of DFO usage too.
Conclusion: Management of these patients requires proper dosing of Desferrioxamine, along with regular otolaryngolgic and audiometric follow-up in order to prevent the effect of ototoxicity of desferal.

Background and Aim: CE-Chirp stimulus has been developed for stimulating more apical regions of the cochlea. Inadequacy of clinical information on the latency and amplitude characteristics of ABR evoked by CE-chirp at different levels in addition to discrepancy in identifying earlier ABR waveforms using CE-chirp stimulus are the reasons of this study.

Methods: This study was done by recoding ABR to click and broad-band CE-chirp stimuli in the right ear of 15 non-randomly selected normal-hearing individuals with age range of 20-30 years old. Frequency of recordable waves I and III, as well as threshold, amplitude, and latency of wave V were compared in response to click and CE-Chirp at 20-80 dB nHL.

Results: At 80 dB nHL, click stimulus evokes waves I and III more frequently than chirp stimulus (p=0.012 and p=0.016 respectively). At 20 and 40 dB nHL, wave V latency evoked by CE-Chirp is significantly longer than wave V latency evoked by click (p=0.012 and p=0.0001 respectively) however, at 80 dB nHL wave V latency evoked by CE-Chirp is shorter than click (p=0.0001). Wave V amplitude for CE-Chirp is significantly larger than for click at levels of 20, 40 and 60 dB nHL (p=0.0001, p=0.0001 and p=0.013 respectively). Wave V threshold is approximately 5 dB lower with CE-chirp compared to click (p=0.014).

Conclusion: Except at high levels, CE-Chirp evokes wave V with larger amplitude and lower threshold than click. Possibility of recording earlier ABR waves is reduced with CE-chirp stimulus.