Evaluation of hearing and vestibular system in patiens with cystic fibrosis

Aminoglycoside antibiotics are frequently used in the treatment of acute pulmonary exacerbations in patients with Cystic Fibrosis. By creating free oxygen radicals, aminoglycosides destroy hairy receptor cells in the inner ear and cause impairement of hearing and vestibular system. Our study is a prospective study in the Department of Pediatric Chest Diseases in Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine, with the diagnosis of Cystic Fibrosis and the evaluation of the hearing and vestibular systems of 43 patients aged 6 to 18 years. Pure tone audiometry and high frequency audiometry were used to evaluate the hearing system and video head impulse test (vHIT) and dynamic visual acuity tests were performed to evaluate the vestibular system. The types and amount of antibiotics taken by the patients till the study date were determined by Pediatric Chest Diseases department . Hearing and vestibular test results were compared through creating groups which take and don't take inhaler aminoglycoside, intravenous aminoglycoside, and aminoglycoside in general. After removing patients with conductive hearing loss, which would affect the test results , only one patient at 35 dB reduction in 8kHz was found in the pure tone audiometry at 125 - 8 kHz frequencies during the evaluation of the results of the remaining 37 patients. All remaining pure tone audiometry tests were normal. In the high frequency audiometry of 37 patients, 26 results were normal, and 11 patients had pathological vii thresholds. 7 of them had bilateral and 4 of them had single ear thresholds damage. The vHIT results were normal in all 42 patients included in the evaluation. Dynamic visual acuity was pathological in 5 of 42 patients. We conducted our study with the test results which we obtained until the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the number of patients in the groups was not high and there was no statistically significant difference between the groups. However, since the number of studies evaluating the hearing and vestibular system associated with the use of aminoglycoside, we have contributed to the literature with the data of our study