Evaluation of the Voice Characteristics and Hearing in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patients Treated with Radiotherapy

In this study, it was aimed to evaluate the voice characteristics and hearing in nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients treated with radiotherapy and to compare them with normal individuals. In addition, the relationship between the obtained voice and hearing data were evaluated. Forty individuals between the ages of 19 and 55 were included in the study. Twenty-one individuals treated (radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy) for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (period between treatment and evaluation is 3 – 225 months) were included in the study group and 19 healthy subjects were included in the control group. Individuals were assessed audiologically by immitansmetry and pure tone audiometry. For evaluation of the voice; GRBAS scale and the VHI - 10 scale were used as subjective assesment, acoustic analysis of the received sound recordings using the "customized PRAAT programme" (F0,% jitter,% shimmer, average NHR) was done for objective assessment. In patients treated for nasopharyngeal carcinoma, subjective voice quality evaluated by GRBAS and VHI - 10 were worse than the control group (p <0.05). Of the objective evaluation data, F0 values were lower than the control group where as jitter and shimmer values, which are perturbation parameters, and NHR values, which are noise parameters, were higher than the control group (p <0.05). Air and bone conduction thresholds and pure tone averages determined by pure audio audiometry in individuals treated with nasopharyngeal carcinoma were higher than the control group (p <0.05). The relationship between voice evaluation results and pure tone audiometry results differs in normal individuals and individuals who received nasopharyngeal carcinoma treatment. As conclusion, both the voice analysis results and the pure tone audiometry results are worse than normal individuals in the patients who received radiotherapy and / or chemoradiotherapy for the head and neck region because of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.