Hearing impairment among young Chinese in a rural area

To evaluate hearing levels in Chinese young people, audiometry was carried out at a rural village in Shandong Prefecture. The subjects were 282 healthy school children and students ranging in age from 7-17 y. All subjects were asked to complete a brief questionnaire on otological symptoms, personal histories and use of noisy playthings. Audiometric threshold testing was performed at the audiometric frequencies of 0.5, 1, 2, 4 and 8 kHz. Cluster analysis was used to estimate the associations between questions in the questionnaire and hearing impairment. Fifty-six subjects (20% subjects) were excluded from the normal groups. Twenty-two ears of the excluded subjects showed 4 kHz-dip and 38 ears showed high frequency hearing loss. An increased prevalence of hearing impairment was found when compared with young Japanese (1% from the nationwide school health survey) and with young Chinese in Shandong Prefecture (0.5%). In the questionnaire, 4 questions on dizziness, head trauma, aminoglycoside administration, and suspicion of Meniere's syndrome, were included in the cluster of hearing impairment. The cause of this hearing impairment was proposed to be the potentiating effects of aminoglycoside antibiotics and exposure to noise.