Medical audiologic evaluation of the patient presenting the primary symptom of tinnitus is an attempt to objectivize the subjective complaint. Tinnitus classification depends upon diagnostic information obtained from the medical-audiologic assessment and includes multi-disciplinary inter- pretation of these data by the audiologist and the otologist working as a team.

Test data obtained from 112 cases, 64 males with a mean age of 56.0 and 58 females with a mean age of 48.9 years, referred for medical-audiologic assessment with the chief complaint of tinnitus, indicate that site of lesion obtained audiologically, site of lesion obtained otologically, and site of lesion of the tinnitus need not necessarily be identical (Table I). In our clinic, medical-audiologic assessment for the complaint of tinnitus consists of cochleo-vestibular evaluation and tinnitus evaluation.

Briefly, cochleo-evaluation consists of pure-tone audiometry; speech audiometry, including speech reception threshold and speech discrimination testing; tone-decay testing; short-increment sensitivity index; impedance audiometry consisting of tympanometry, acoustic reflexes (contralateral and ipsilateral) reflex-decay testing, and the Metz test for recruitment.