Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 17, 2026
In Vivo Morphometric Analysis of Human Cranial Nerves Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Menière's Disease Ears and Normal Hearing Ears
Published on: February 21, 2018
Intractable Ménière's disease. Modelling of the treatment by means of statistical analysis
Noelia Sanchez-Ferrandiz1, Secundino Fernandez-Gonzalez, Francisco Guillen-Grima
1Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Complejo Hospitalario La Mancha-Centro, Spain.
Objective:
To evaluate the value of different variables of the clinical history, auditory and vestibular tests and handicap measurements to define intractable or disabling Ménière's disease.
Methods:
This is a prospective study with 212 patients of which 155 were treated with intratympanic gentamicin and considered to be suffering a medically intractable Ménière's disease. Age and sex adjustments were performed with the 11 variables selected. Discriminant analysis was performed either using the aforementioned variables or following the stepwise method.
Results:
Different variables needed to be sex and/or age adjusted and both data were included in the discriminant function. Two different mathematical formulas were obtained and four models were analyzed. With the model selected, diagnostic accuracy is 77.7%, sensitivity is 94.9% and specificity is 52.8%.
Conclusion:
After discriminant analysis we found that the most informative variables were the number of vertigo spells, the speech discrimination score, the time constant of the VOR and a measure of handicap, the "dizziness index".
