Ampleness of head movements of children and adolescents with sensorineural hearing loss.

Introduction: Head movements are controlled by the vestibular system. Children with sensorineural hearing loss can present restrictions in ampleness of head movements due to damage in the vestibule-cochlear systems, resulting from injury in the inner ear.

Objective: To evaluate the ampleness of head movements of children with normal hearing and children with sensorineural hearing loss and compare data between groups.

Methods: Cross-sectional study that evaluated the ampleness of head movements of 96 students, being 48 with normal hearing and 48 with sensorineural hearing loss, of both sexes, with aged between 7 and 18 years old. The performance of ampleness of head movements was analyzed by a manual goniometric evaluation, according the references proposed by Marques. To the statistical analysis we used the t-Student test in case of normality of the data or the Mann-Whitney test when did not applied the suppositions of normality.

Results: Hearing loss children showed less mean in ampleness of all movements of head compared to normal hearing children, pointing difference to movements of flexion (p = 0,001), lateral inclination to the right (p = 0,025) and lateral rotation to the left (p = 0,021).

Conclusion: Hearing loss children showed reduction in the ampleness of these head movements: flexion, lateral inclination to the right and lateral rotation to the left compared to normal hearing children.