Vestibular testing in children with severe-to-profound hearing loss

Many studies showed that children with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) have possible vestibular affection which is related to the severity of cochlear pathology.

Objectives: this work is designed to evaluate vestibular function in children with congenital severe to profound SNHL and correlate the degree of hearing loss with the results of vestibular tests.

Methods: this work included 52 children divided into two groups; control group consisted of 20 normal hearing children with no vestibular complaints, and study group consisted of 32 children with congenital severe to profound SNHL. All children were submitted to basic audiologic evaluation, combined vestibular evoked myogenic potentials, sinusoidal harmonic acceleration test (SHA) of rotatory chair test.

Results: all children in the control group had normal oVEMP and cVEMPs results while abnormal cVEMPs and oVEMPs results were found in 89% and 96.9% of the tested ears of the study group respectively. Sinusoidal harmonic acceleration test results were normal in control group with significant reduction in gain, phase lead and higher level of asymmetry in 50% of the children in study group. There was a significant relation between the degree of hearing loss and the cVEMPs, oVEMPs abnormalities, while SHA test results showed no such relationship.

Conclusion: There is an evident vestibular abnormalities in children with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss as revealed by the rotatory chair testing and VEMPs recordings. Vestibular assessment is very important in such group as it has an impact on their rehabilitation plan.