Objective:To assess the efficacy of intraoperative brainstem auditory evoked responses (BAER) in predicting postoperative hearing improvement in surgery for conductive hearing loss.Study Design:A prospective study of consecutive patients undergoing surgery for conductive hearing loss under general anesthesia by a single surgeon.Setting:A tertiary care university affiliated medical center.Patients:All patients undergoing surgery for conductive hearing loss by the senior author between June 25,1993 and March 20,1995.Interventions:Pre- and postreconstruction intraoperative BAERs; pre- and postoperative pure tone and speech audiometry.Main Outcome Measures:Changes in audiometric pure tone air-conduction thresholds, bone-air gaps (BAG), and speech reception thresholds (SRT), compared with changes in BAER wave five (V) latencies.Results:A decrease in the wave V latency on the intraoperative BAER correlates significantly with improvement in postoperative puretone air-conduction, BAG, and SRT using X2and linear regression analyses.Conclusions:Improvement in intraoperative BAER correlates with postoperative hearing improvement in surgery for conductive hearing loss done under general anesthesia in our population.