Frequency patterns in cochlear, brainstem, and cerebral lesions.

Three groups of patients with different pathologies (cerebral, brainstem, and cochlear lesions) were tested and compared for performance on frequency patterns. Results indicated that the frequency pattern test was highly sensitive to cerebral lesions (83%), but not as sensitive to brainstem lesions (45%). There was very little overlap between results of subjects with cochlear hearing loss and those with cerebral lesions. The specificity of frequency patterns for detecting cerebral lesions (the number of true negative results divided by the number of cochlear subjects) was 88.2%.