[Development of tone curves in sensorineural deafness in children]

The authors reviews 239 cases of child sensorineural deafness (478 ears studied both separately and in correlation with the controlateral ear) to try and identify the evolutionary trend of the tone curves throughout the follow-up period, which spanned nearly 20 years in some cases. The difficulties encountered in this study were due to several factors, namely the problem involving very accurate assessment in very young children, the high incidence of tubotympanal disease in the very young, the hard to obtain definition and quantitative evaluation of the notion of progressiveness, as well as the need to analyze the evolutionary patterns in global terms (mean hearing loss), from one frequency to the next and from one ear to the other, since such tone loss patterns are not always symmetric. The authors state their opinion derived from a large number of cases regarding a situation, which characterizes a relatively frequent (over 25% of cases) aggravation of perceptive hearing loss in children.