Objective: Otological diseases impair patients’ physical, mental, and social quality of life. Surgical intervention against otologic diseases can improve the deterioration of the patient’s quality of life and the recovery of hearing loss; however, no large-scale multicenter studies in Japan have investigated patients’ quality of life after otologic surgery. To conduct a prospective investigation on the quality of life of patients who underwent otologic surgery. Study Design: Case-control study. Setting: A multicenter study involving 21 hospitals in Japan. Patients: We enrolled 199 patients with cholesteatoma, 137 patients with chronic otitis media, 72 patients with otosclerosis, 126 patients before cochlear implantations, 12 patients with middle ear malformation, and 27 patients with other otologic diseases. Interventions: We compared the impairment in patients’ quality of life between different otologic diseases and examined the effects of surgical intervention using generic and disease-specific quality-of-life questionnaires. Main outcome measure(s): Improvement of the quality of life of the patients measured with general or disease-specific questionnaires. Results: Our results revealed that the patients’ preoperative quality of life was lower than that of the control group. Patients who underwent cochlear implantation had a significantly lower quality of life compared with other groups. The results also revealed that surgical intervention could improve postoperative quality of life. In addition, the study revealed the characteristic features of changes in the quality of life in each otologic disease group. Conclusions: These findings will be useful for patients when deciding on surgical intervention. It would also benefit otologic surgeons when explaining surgical indications or recommending surgical interventions.
Hosoya et al. (Mon,) studied this question.