Utilization of amplicon-based targeted sequencing panel for the massively parallel sequencing of sporadic hearing impairment patients from Saudi Arabia.

Background: Hearing Impairment (HI) can have genetic or environmental causes and in some cases, an interplay of both. Genetic causes are difficult to determine as mutations in more than 90 genes have been shown recently to be responsible for HI. Providing a genetic diagnostic test for HI is therefore a challenge especially for ethnic groups where GJB2 mutations are shown to be rare.