Perioperative Hearing Evaluations for Patients Undergoing Tympanostomy Tube Placement.

Importance: Obtaining hearing thresholds is an important step in the evaluation of a child with otitis media because decreased hearing in the presence of a chronic middle ear effusion factors into the decision to place tympanostomy tubes (TTs).

Objective: To provide evidence regarding appropriate use of perioperative hearing evaluations in conjunction with TTs.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Case series with medical record review of all patients aged 0 to 24 years who received TTs at a tertiary pediatric care facility from June 1, 2010, through June 1, 2011. Medical records were abstracted by 1 researcher for surgical, audiometric, tympanometric, clinical, and patient demographic data. The data analysis was performed between December 1, 2014, and June 1, 2015.

Main Outcomes And Measures: Audiometric data were examined to determine the number of patients with hearing loss preoperatively and postoperatively, with the intention to describe the population with no prior hypothesis regarding results.

Results: Of 2274 patients identified, 910 (40.0%) were female. Median (interquartile range) age at TT placement was 2.62 (1.48-4.94) years. A total of 1757 (77.3%) underwent audiometric evaluation preoperatively, 1742 (76.6%) postoperatively, and 1395 (61.3%) both preoperatively and postoperatively; 170 (7.5%) had no audiometric testing. Within 1 year after surgery, 271 (11.9%) of patients had evidence of nonfunctional tubes. Postoperatively, 19.9% (347 of the 1742 patients who received a postoperative evaluation) had hearing loss. In all, 89 (3.9%) patients had a permanent sensorineural hearing loss, and 15 (0.66%) had a persistent conductive hearing loss.

Conclusions And Relevance: A postoperative audiometric examination should be performed in children who have hearing loss when evaluated before TT placement to determine whether resolution of the hearing loss was obtained.