Effects of severe bothersome tinnitus on cognitive function measured with standardized tests

Abstract

Neurocognitive tests compared abilities in people with bothersome tinnitus against an age-, gender-, and education-matched normative population. Participants between 18 and 60 years had subjective, unilateral or bilateral, nonpulsatile tinnitus for >6 months and a Tinnitus Handicap Inventory score of ≥ 38. Results from a first testing session showed deficits in learning, learning rates, immediate recall of heard words, and use of a serial order encoding strategy. Initial reliance on serial order encoding and, later, increased intrusion of incorrect words towards normal levels might indicate a less demanding strategy to compensate for weakness in associative memory for semantic categories.

Figures

Figure 1

Mean and 95% confidence limits for performance during three testing sessions (Session 1, Session 2, and Session 3) on standardized verbal tests. A. Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) for verbal fluency based on number of freely generated words for three specified letters. B. California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) of number of words immediately recalled after hearing 16 words from List A during the first trial (Trial 1), from List B, and across five trials for List A. C. Number of List A words recalled after 5 trials that correctly were members of a cued semantic category following short or long (20 minutes) delays or freely recalled after a long delay. D. Derived per trial scores across 5 trials for List A. Semantic and serial cluster ratios based on the number of consecutively recalled words that were from the same semantic category or followed the original serial order of presented words. Intrusion score reflects the number of incorrectly recalled words. Inserted p-values in each plot reflect the Friedman ANOVA assessment of performance differences across the three testing sessions.