RATIONALE: New ways to find out about hearing loss after treatment with chemotherapy may improve the ability to plan cancer treatment and may help patients live more comfortably.

PURPOSE: This clinical trial is assessing ear damage in young cancer patients treated with cisplatin.

OBJECTIVES:

• Determine the optimal criteria for determination of ototoxicity in younger cancer patients treated with cisplatin.
• Determine the feasibility of including ultrahigh frequency and evoked otoacoustic emission testing as adjunctive measures of ototoxicity.
• Determine the feasibility and necessity of central review of audiometry data.

OUTLINE: This is a multicenter, prospective, cohort study.

Patients undergo hearing tests (conventional, otoscopy, ultrahigh frequency, and otoacoustic emission testing) before the first course of planned cisplatin, before each subsequent course of cisplatin, and 4 weeks after the last dose of cisplatin.

Patients who are scheduled to receive hematopoietic progenitor stem cell transplantation undergo hearing tests before the transplantation and 4 weeks after transplantation.

PROJECTED ACCRUAL: A total of 282 patients will be accrued for this study.

DISEASE CHARACTERISTICS:

• Planning to undergo treatment with any cisplatin-containing therapeutic regimen for cancer

  • Treatment does not need to be on a COG therapeutic study

• Planning to enroll on clinical trial ACCL0431

PATIENT CHARACTERISTICS:

• Not specified

PRIOR CONCURRENT THERAPY:

• See Disease Characteristics
• No prior cisplatin

Patients planning to undergo treatment with any cisplatin-containing therapeutic regimen for cancer or planning to enroll on clinical trial ACCL0431