Abstract

Introduction: Hearing makes man a social being, those who are hard of hearing cannot express themselves because of lack of ability to speak. Hearing impairment at any age has serious effects on the day to day life of an individual and he/she feels handicapped socially, emotionally, and scholastically. It is a common chronic impairment, particularly in the older adults, there are many causes which may lead to hearing impairment and is known to vary from place to place and country to country in both sexes with advancing age. There is scarcity of such information in India; this gave us the idea to undertake a study on hearing impairment in the local population who are attending the ENT OPD at this tertiary care centre.     

Aims and Objectives: To assess the hearing status in different age groups who attended the ENT OPD at the tertiary level in eight months with complaints of hearing impairment.

Study Design: Retrospective study.

Material and Methods: This study was conducted in the Department of ENT of a tertiary care hospital, in which audiometry records were analysed to see the status of hearing and data segregation was done according to age, sex and involvement of the side of the ear (right or left).

Result: 459 audiometry records were analysed in this study out of which the youngest patient was 8 years old and oldest one was 84 years old. Surprisingly in this study male patients with hearing complaints attending the OPD (as per the records) were less that is 209 (45.5%) compared to the female that is 250 (54.5%). Maximum number of patients attending the ENT OPD belonged to the age group of 21-30 (108 in number) and least number belonged to the age group of 81-90 years i.e only 1.

Conclusion: We know hearing problems increase as the age progresses and males are affected more than females but in this study paradoxical observation was recorded.

Keywords: Hearing impaired, PTA.