ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurol.
Sec. Neuro-Otology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fneur.2025.1596274
Correlation of non-auditory comorbidities and hearing loss in chronic subjective tinnitus patients: a retrospective database study
Provisionally accepted
Konstantin Tziridis1*
Benjamin Neubert1Anna Seehaus1
Patrick Krauss1
Achim Schilling1
Petra Georgiewa Brueggemann2
Birgit Mazurek2
Holger Schulze1- 1ENT clinic, head and neck surgery, University Hospital Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany
- 2Tinnitus Center, Charité University Medicine Berlin, Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
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BackgroundTinnitus is a symptom often associated with hearing loss (HL). Its development and progression are still not completely clear as the heterogeneity of tinnitus-related HL data is high. Here, we attempt to investigate if a part of this variance can be correlated to single or combinations of non-auditory comorbidities with pure-tone audiometric data in a chronic subjective tinnitus patient collective.MethodsThe information of 136 tinnitus patient files were extracted retrospectively. The patients did not suffer from any auditory impairment except a possible HL and tinnitus; non-auditory comorbidities were identified from the files and categorized by their ICD-10 category. Comorbidity classes were: Endocrine / metabolic diseases. psychiatric / behavioral disorders, diseases of the central nervous system, diseases of the circulatory system, diseases of the respiratory system, diseases of the digestive system and muscle-skeletal diseases. The pure tone audiometry data as well as tinnitus pitch and loudness were correlated with their non-auditory comorbidity classes and patients’ age group by non-parametric and parametric analyses, where appropriate.ResultsDependent on the age group, the number of comorbidities could lead to a significant increase or decrease in HL. Only in older patients a linear correlation of the number of non-auditory comorbidities and an increase in HL could be found. Also, the correlation of maximal HL frequency and tinnitus frequency can be only seen in specific age and comorbidity-number groups. Only some specific non-auditory comorbidity classes showed significant effects (decrease or increase) on HL in specific age groups.ConclusionsTaken together we argue that in future tinnitus patient studies non-auditory comorbidities should be taken into account as possible covariables that might explain the variance found in the auditory threshold development of these patients.
Keywords: Chronic subjective tinnitus, comorbidities, Audiometry, retrospective patient study, Hearing Loss
Received: 20 Mar 2025; Accepted: 30 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tziridis, Neubert, Seehaus, Krauss, Schilling, Brueggemann, Mazurek and Schulze. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Konstantin Tziridis, ENT clinic, head and neck surgery, University Hospital Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany
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