A comparison between systemic and intratympanic steroid therapies as initial therapy for idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss: a meta-analysis

Abstract

Conclusions: Intratympanic steroid (ITS) treatment groups exhibited better outcomes in PTA improvement and recovery rate than systemic steroid therapy (SST) groups. Whether initial hearing loss severity would influence the PTA improvement and recovery rate still requires further research.

Objective: This article was aimed at evaluating whether intratympanic steroid (ITS) treatment would provide benefits over systemic steroid therapy (SST) as initial therapy in patients with idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSHL). A meta-analysis was carried out based on published RCTs that included the hearing outcomes of ITS treatment and SST in ISSHL as initial therapy. Both PTA differences and recovery rate were analyzed.

Methods: The literature search was based on the online database including Pubmed, Embase, and Cochrane trails, which completed in July 2016. This study extracted the relevant data following the selection criteria. Mean difference (MD) of PTA differences and Odds ratio (OR) of recovery rate were calculated within 95% confidence intervals.

Results: Six eligible articles were reviewed. The pooled MDs of PTA differences was 3.42 (95% CI = 0.17–6.67, p = .04) and the pooled ORs of recovery rate was 2.05 (95% CI = 1.38–3.03, p = .0003), which indicated that ITS treatment yielded better PTA improvement than SST. Sub-group analyses based on the initial hearing loss were also conducted; however, the difference was insignificant according to our analysis results (p = .82 for PTA improvement and p = .26 for recovery rate).

Keywords:

• Idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss
• intratympanic steroid treatment
• transtympanic steroid treatment
• meta-analysis

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 Program), Grant no. 2014CB943003 and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Grant no. 81300819 and Grant no. 81170912.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (973 Program), Grant no. 2014CB943003 and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Grant no. 81300819 and Grant no. 81170912. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.