During the past 2 years the authors experienced 56 cases of sudden deafness. Sudden deafness treated in this paper means extreme deafness of sensory type occurring suddenly and with one attack without attributable causes.
The authors considered that somatic or psychic fatigue, infection in the upper respiratory tracts, labor under mild noises etc do not cause in themselves sudden deafness, but induce it. Such inducements existed in 19 cases: somatic or psychic fatigue, 9; infection, 4; labor, 4 others, 2.
Incidence of this disease is more frequent with males than with females, 33: 23. The authors consider that it is not because males have more remarkable disposition than females, but that they are more often exposed to the inducements.
This disease is very rarely seen in people under 20. People over 20 are equally liable to this disease, although people in their twenties appear to be a little more liable than others. This age distribution is unfavorable to those who presuppose the existence of organic lesion in the vascular channels as the cause of this disease.
Hearing types are divided: 18 cases of total loss; 14 cases of severe flat type loss; 17 cases of high frequency impairment; 7 cases of other types. The relation between the number of relapsing days after sizure and hearing types is as follows: total loss is predominant with the group having short period after seizure, while high frequency impairment is predominant with the group having long period after seizure. These findings and the observations of the shift of the audiograms of the cured cases make the authors suppose that some of the high frequency impairment is caused by betterment of low frequency of deafness of flat type. The authors subjected 8 cases to Fowler's B. T., 6 of them showing positive, while 2 showing negative.
Tinnitus was observed with 98% of the patients, while vertigo with 55%.
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