Principles and clinical applications of auditory evoked potentials in the geriatric population.

Age-related changes in auditory evoked potentials are complex and complicated by the confounding effects of gender; concomitant high-frequency hearing sensitivity loss; and, in the case of event-related responses, the nature of the task used to elicit the response. There is a tendency for amplitude to decline and latency to increase, but these trends are not always clear-cut. There is also a tendency for activation patterns to move forward from parietal to frontal areas as age increases. The dichotic listening tool has revealed age-related changes in interaural and interhemispheric asymmetries. These asymmetries seem to be related to loss in the efficiency of interhemispheric transfer via the corpus callosum.