It is said that hearing recovery in idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (sudden deabness) is worse in patients with vertigo than in those without vertigo. It is also known that vertigo frequently accompanies profound sudden deafness in which complete hearing recovery is extremely difficult. Therefore, the effect of vertigo on hearing recovery cannot be understood in simplistic terms. We evaluated the outcome of sudden deafness with and without vertigo considering the severity of hearing loss, the shape of the audiogram, the time between the onset of symptoms and the first audiogram, and contralateral hearing ability.
The subjects for this investigation included 936 patients who came to our university hosipital within one week of the onset of hearing loss from 1975 to 1989. Of these 936 patients, 247 (26.4 %) had accompanying vertigo. The shapes of their audiogram were divided into five types : low-tone hearing loss, high-tone hearing loss, profound type, flat type and others ; vertigo occurred in 6.0 %, 45.0 %, 66.7 %, 15.8 % and 17.0 %, respectively. In other words, vertigo occurred frequently in patients with severe hearing loss of high-tone frequencies. Hearing recovery of high-tone frequencies was worse in patients with vertigo than in those without vertigo even when the initial hearing loss was the same. We considered that these results were due to anatomical factors, the cochlear basal turn being more proximal to the vestibular apparatus than the upper turn.