Effect of Type II Diabetes on Speech Perception in Noise

Abstract

There is dearth of literature targeting the behavioral correlates to central auditory processing among individuals with Diabetes. As communication being crucial aspect of human existence and losing the skill to effectively communicate adversely affects quality of life (QoL).So the present study was undertaken with the aim to examine the effect of type II Diabetes on speech perception in noise. A total of 80 subjects equally divided in to experimental and control group participated in this research. Experimental group consisted of 40 individuals with  Diabetes (TYPE II) diagnosed for minimum five years between the age range of 28 – 60 years, with a mean age of 44years with equal gender representation. The effect of Diabetes on speech perception abilities among individuals with greater than 5 years of diabetic age, results revels a statistically significant difference between both the groups with p value < 0.01 for speech perception task and also there was association between the age of diabetes and the quick SIN scores for individuals with diabetes. We hypothesize that reduced sensory processing ability which could be due to involvement of various structures of central nervous system might have contributed to poor speech understanding abilities in diabetics individuals.