BioMARK as electrophysiological tool for assessing children at risk for (central) auditory processing disorders without reading deficits

Biological Marker of auditory processing (BioMARK) is an electrophysiological test tool widely known as Speech-evoked ABR. Several previous investigations have shown the utility of speech-evoked ABR in the diagnosis of language based processing deficits like learning disability and specific language impairment; however missing from literature is a study that has ruled out the existence of comorbidity of such conditions and carefully delineated the efficacy of speech-evoked ABR in children with children with auditory processing disorders sans reading deficits. Hence, the present study aimed at investigating Speech-evoked ABR in children with auditory processing disorders without reading problems. A total of 336 school going children in the age range of 8-12 years were screened for presence of central auditory processing deficits. Among the 51 children who were identified as at risk, 15 were randomly selected and served as experimental group. The control group comprised of fifteen age matched children. The inter-group comparison was done using MANOVA, which revealed significant prolongations of latencies of waves V and A (p = 0.001) along with marginal reductions in V/A slope (p = 0.052) and amplitude of responses to first formant (p = 0.065). The responses to higher frequencies did not differ between the groups. Speech-evoked ABR are affected in children who are at risk of central auditory processing disorders sans reading deficits which probably indicates the presence of abnormal brainstem encoding of speech signal in this population.