[4] It has not been well studied with respect to its clinical utility, although it can be used as part of a test battery for helping to diagnose auditory neuropathy.
While several researchers raced to publish the first detailed account of the FFR, the term "FFR" was originally coined by Worden and Marsh in 1968, to describe the CM-like neural components recorded directly from several brainstem nuclei (research based on Jewett and Williston's work on click ABR's).
[10][11] The FFR can be evoked to sinusoids, complex tones, steady-state vowels, tonal sweeps, or consonant-vowel syllables.
This is known as a stimulus artifact, and researchers and clinicians seek to avoid it, as it is a contamination of the true recorded response of the nervous system.
[14][15][16] There may be uses for the information the FFR can provide regarding steady state, time-variant, and speech signals for better understanding of individuals with hearing loss and its effects and of people with psychopathology.
[1] Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the temporal pattern of phase-locked brainstem neural activity generating the FFR may contain information relevant to the binaural processes underlying spatial release from masking (SRM) in challenging listening environments.