Effect of Diabetes Mellitus on the Sense of Hearing of Adult Population of Hyderabad

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To assess the hearing thresholds connection between Diabetes Mellitus (DM) and hearing impairment (HI) among cases and controls.
METHODOLOGY: This case control study was conducted in Physiology department in collaboration of Department of ENT, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) Jamshoro from February to July 2017. Total 196 subjects were divided into two groups, 98 controls and 98 cases; the subjects were collected from the diabetic clinic LUMHS Hyderabad. They were included in the study after screening and ear examination. They all were exposed to pure tone audiometry by Audiometer MAICO 39 (Berlin, Germany). The pure tone conduction was measured at 7 octave wave frequencies at minimum intensity which was heard and the graph was plotted on Audiogram. Hearing thresholds among subjects and HI were investigated.
RESULTS: The data was analysed with Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. The occurrence of HI was 34% which were slight to moderate degree. Significantly higher difference was observed in right ear at 500, 2000, 4000, 6000 and 8000 Hz frequencies (p-value=0.004, 0.025, 0.002, 0.001 and 0.001) respectively and in left ear highly significant difference was obtained at 500, 4000, 6000 and 8000 Hz frequencies (p-value=0.017, 0.023, 0.001 and 0.001) respectively among subjects.
CONCLUSION: The hearing Impairment was highly significant in cases as compared to controls and hearing threshold difference was significant mainly at higher frequencies between two groups.