Increased risk of sensorineural hearing loss in patients with spinal cord injury: a nationwide longitudinal follow-up study

Study design Retrospective cohort study with 10 years follow-up. Objective To compare the risks of sensorineural hearing loss in patients with and without spinal cord injury, based on a nationally representative sample. Setting Taiwan's Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2005. Method A total of 2006 participants who had been aged between 20 and 69 and who had spinal cord injury as of 2002-06 were enrolled in the spinal cord injury group. The non-spinal cord injury group consisted of 8024 sex- and age-matched, randomly sampled participants without spinal cord injury. Then, their sensorineural hearing loss -cumulative incidence curves were generated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Stratified Cox proportional-hazard regression was employed to estimate the effect of having spinal cord injury on patients' subsequent risk of sensorineural hearing loss. Results During the follow-up, 30 patients in the spinal cord injury group and 87 in the non-spinal cord injury group developed sensorineural hearing loss. As such, the cumulative incidence of sensorineural hearing loss was significantly higher in the spinal cord injury group than the non-spinal cord injury group (2.16 vs. 1.21 per 1000 person-years, p = 0.008). The adjusted hazard ratio of sensorineural hearing loss for the spinal cord injury group was 1.75 times that of the non-spinal cord injury group (95% CI, 1.14-2.68, p = 0.01). The patients with non-cervical SCI appeared to have a higher magnitude of SNHL risk than their cervical SCI counterparts. Conclusion Our study showed that patients with spinal cord injury have an increased risk of developing sensorineural hearing loss.

Automated summary

The study found that patients with spinal cord injury are at a higher risk of developing sensorineural hearing loss compared to those without spinal cord injury, with patients with non-cervical spinal cord injury having a higher risk.