Cisplatin is a medicine that is being administered as part several chemotherapy protocols for many types of cancer in adult patients and often causes a permanent hearing loss. This side effect is referred as ototoxicity and it may negatively affect the patients post-treatment quality of life. In recent years, there has been considerable debate on adopting different test tools for timely of identification hearing loss caused by cancer and its treatment that will facilitate effective management of ototoxic hearing loss.

Pure-tone Audiometry (PTA) is a routinely used test to identify overall hearing loss and Oto-acoustic Emission (OAE) is an objective test usually done  to check the integrity of the inner ear. We can identify  ototoxic hearing loss based on PTA findings. Though, PTA has been the gold standard test tool for ototoxicity assessment in adult cancer patients, OAE is thought to be more sensitive than PTA to identify subtle inner ear changes happening in ototoxic treatments. However, it is less often used in cancer patients due to lack of research evidence.

Hence, We propose to evaluate the effectiveness of OAE assessment in identifying the presence of ototoxic hearing loss in adult cancer patients receiving Cisplatin based chemotherapy by comparing with Pure-tone Audiometry (PTA) findings during the course chemotherapy.

PTA and OAE findings will be obtained before, during and after the administration of Cisplatin based chemotherapy in eligible adult cancer patients according to the proposed inclusion/ exclusion criteria. These findings will be subjected to statistical analysis for agreement to check feasibility of OAE assessment in timely identification of ototoxic hearing loss.

The potential outcome of the study may have several clinical applications and usefulness as follows.

1-To understand and characterize the ototoxic hearing loss and its course from audiological point of view which may help us to identify patients earlier if feasible and also counsel them regarding the long term effects.

2-To establish a relationship among audiological indicators of ototoxicity over time and to design the audiological monitoring protocol accordingly in order to prevent and manage ototoxic hearing loss effectively.

3-To design ototoxicity monitoring protocol by using OAE for difficult-to-test population, who may not provide reliable responses in subjective hearing evaluations like Pure-tone Audiometry.

4-To decide upon well-informed treatment decision and counseling