Frequency of Sensorineural Hearing Loss among Children with Pyogenic Meningitis

Aim: To find out the frequency of sensorineural hearing loss among children with pyogenic meningitis.

Study Design: Cross-sectional.

Place and Duration of Study: Study was conducted at Ziauddin university hospital during the period of July 2019 to February 2020.

Methodology: About 96 participants were enrolled in the study between the age group of one month up to 12 years. Patients were included on the basis of clinical presentation and laboratory findings of pyogenic meningitis. An expert audiologist performed the brainstem evoked response audiometry test before discharging the patient from the hospital. For data analysis SPSS version-20 was used. All the quantitative variables were calculated as mean with standard deviation while qualitative data were presented as frequency and percentages. To find out association between variables, the Mann Whitney U-test and chi-square test was applied while P-value ≤0.05 was considered as significant.

Results: Mean age with standard deviation was 6.8 ±2.3. Majority of the study participants were boys (57%). The frequency of sensorineural hearing loss was 17%. It was more among females than their male counter parts that was 64.7% and 35.3% respectively but no significant association was reported. The younger age group was having higher frequency of sensorineural hearing loss (47.1%), followed by the age group of 6-8 years (29.4%) and the very small number of participants were affected from the age group of 9-12 years (23.5%) but all the age groups were having no significant association with frequency of hearing loss.

Conclusion: It can be concluded that sensorineural hearing loss is the most common complication reported among the children with pyogenic meningitis in current setup so there is a need of early evaluation of hearing problems in all patients diagnosed with pyogenic meningitis.