Effect of Suctioning of the Middle Ear Effusion on Hearing Condition Before Ventilation Tube Insertion

OME is a Common disease in children. over than 90% of children in preschool ages experienced this disease once at least. Despite medical therapy about 10% of the OME patients won't improved and these are the group of patients who referred to as chronic OME patients. Insertion of VT in TM is an accepted therapy for these patients and during surgery for insertion of VT, suctioning of middle ear effusion is done. This suctioning produces noise and this noise can produce SNHL. Further, during suctioning probable traumatization of external ear canal, developing hemorrhage in the canal, obscuring visual field of surgeon, and finally surgical time becoming too long are probably. This double blind clinical trial that included 50 patients with bilateral COME evaluated the effect of suctioning of middle ear effusion before VT insertion on hearing acuity of patients with COME. All selected patients had type B tympanogram and conductive hearing loss over 20db in both ears. The patient with unilateral COME and tympanogram of type C was omitted. In right ear after myringotomy and in left ear after myringotomy and suctioning of middle ears effusion VT was inserted and patients were followed up in one week, three weeks and three months after surgery and in each examination the degree of improvement of hearing was evaluated by mean of audiometery. The results of this trial analyzed by statistical chi-square and t.test. 46 suctioned ear(92.4%) and 34 unsuctioned ear(68%) developed hearing improvement at the end of the first week. Hearing improvement in the two groups at the end of third week and third month was 100%. Therefore, we concluded that the degree of hearing improvement in patients with COME doesn't correlates with middle ear effusion suctioning during surgery for inserting VT.