Type 1 Diabetes Can Impact Auditory Dysfunction

Do patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM) experience higher rates of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL)?

Bottom line
There is a relationship between type 1 DM and auditory dysfunction. Among type 1 diabetics, the odds of hearing loss are higher as compared with controls.

Background: The relationship between diabetes mellitus (DM) and SNHL has not been well established. Insulin-dependent DM is characterized by the presence of insulitis and β-cell autoantibodies, which arise from autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing β-cells. The common complications of DM, such as retinopathy, nephropathy, and neuropathy, are mostly mediated through microangiopathy In DM patients, the mechanism of hearing dysfunction (as with dysfunction in the retina and kidney) is not clear, largely because it cannot be assessed by intravital examination. Earlier studies held the opinion that pure tone audiometric thresholds were significantly higher in diabetic patients than in control subjects at all frequencies; however, others thought that there was no statistically significant difference in the thresholds for pure tones between diabetes and controls.

Study design: Search of PubMed, Embase, and Wanfang Data.

Synopsis: The electronic databases were searched for eligible relevant studies up through May 2016, and the reference lists of the retrieved articles were used for additional manual search. All the articles included in this pooled analysis were determined according to the preset inclusion and exclusion criteria. A total of 15 studies were included for further combined analysis. The results showed that patients with type 1 diabetes had a significantly higher prevalence of hearing loss than controls; standardized mean of differences (SMD) of pure tone audiometry at 4,000 Hz between diabetes and controls was 0.87; SMD of the latency time was 0.54 for wave III and 0.61 for wave V, respectively; and SMD of the interpeak latency time was 0.41 for waves I to III and 0.61 for waves I to V, respectively, between diabetics and controls.

Citation: Teng ZP, Tian R, Xing FL, et al. An association of type 1 diabetes mellitus with auditory dysfunction: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Laryngoscope. 2017;127;1689–1697.