Assessment of Quality of Life in Chronic Otitis Media After Type 1 Tympanoplasty - An Observational Study

This study is aimed to assess the outcome of Type-1Tympanoplasty in patients of Chronic Otitis Media (COM)- mucosal type and document the associated hearing gain and correlate it with the improvement in Quality of life (QOL) using COMOT (Chronic Otitis Media Outcome Test) 15 scoring. A hospital based prospective study was carried out in a tertiary care centre on 80 patients of mucosal type of COM. Patients were given COMOT 15 questionnaire to score the symptoms and pure tone audiometry (PTA) was done to assess hearing level. All patients underwent Type 1 Tympanoplasty via post aural approach. Patients were followed up regularly at 3rd, 6th and 12th month following surgery. QOL and PTA were reassessed during follow up visits. Among the 80 patients enrolled, 58.8% were females and 41.2% were males. The pre-operative mean value with standard deviation for ear discharge is 2.70 ± 1.02 which got reduced to 2.4 ± 1.07 by the end of 12th month. The preoperative average hearing loss in right ear was 25.15 ± 15.7 while in left ear it was 26.26 ± 16.7 which got reduced to 19.5 ± 11.01 and 20.5 ± 11.39 respectively. There was statistically significant improvement in QOL and hearing levels of all patients who underwent tympanoplasty as seen in the various parameters of postoperative COMOT 15 scoring with a p value of 0.001. Tympanoplasty resulted in marked improvement in disease-specific QOL as well as their hearing. Hence it should be recommended to the patients with COM for improving the QOL.