Hearing in young diabetic patients.

Among patients who have sensorineural hearing loss of unknown etiology, diabetes is one of the diseases to be routinely investigated. The purpose of this study was to examine the uncertain relationship between sensorineural hearing loss and diabetes. The authors prospectively studied the pure tone audiometry in 60 diabetic patients, aged less than 40 years and in 60 randomly selected age and sex matched non-diabetic control subjects. The average hearing threshold of the diabetic patients showed a significant elevation than the control subjects although this average threshold in the young diabetic group was still within normal limits. Finally, no consistent association between the average hearing threshold and factors; such as duration of disease, controllable status of diabetes, presence of family history of diabetes or presence of any complication was found to be significant among young diabetic patients.