Auditory Effects of Aging on Patients with Sensorineural Hearing Loss due to Streptomycin

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate how aging affects the auditory acuity of patients who have received streptomycin injections as a therapy for pulmonary tuberculosis, and have lost some degree of hearing.
A retrospective analysis of 159 cases showed only 31 cases, 18 male, and 13 female, to have reliable audiograms over the course of treatment. The selection criteria were audiograms before, and immediately after, completion of 3 to 6 months of streptomycin therapy, and audiograms 8 to 11 years after the completion of the injections.
Contrary to our expectation, the effects of aging on streptomycin induced deafness were neither additive nor synergistic. Patients who showed a greater degree of hearing loss immediately after the drug injection appeared to have less of an aging effect, and vice versa, thus the overall outcome of their current hearing level were more or less the same in all the patients.