Demographic Profile of Hearing Deficiency in an Urban Referral Hospital (2019-2022)

The ear is a unique organ that gives us the modality of hearing. The ear can be damaged by variety of factors such as different disease processes, trauma, excessive exposure to noise, effect of some drugs and aging process. All these factors lead to malfunction of ear resulting in some kind of hearing loss.

The health and quality of life is affected tremendously by hearing loss. The common ear diseases such as wax, infections of external auditory canal and infections of middle ear cleft such as Acute Otitis Media, Chronic Otitis Media, Otitis Media with Effusion carries a significant proportion of causes that lead to deafness. All these conditions can be diagnosed early and managed properly to reduce the overall burden of deafness throughout the globe.

The sense of hearing carries a very important role in the process of communication. Deafness is a cause of major morbidity the goes very often undiagnosed and unreported even in a tertiary health care facility. This causes a major problem in the planning of future management of hearing loss because of non-availability of proper database in our health system. The purpose of our study is to analyze the demographic characteristics of individuals presenting with hearing loss in an urban referral hospital using the available database of pure tone audiometry results.