耳鳴患者の苦痛の対象-問診表の使用を試みて-

概要

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Tinnitus patients have several kinds of complaints and many of them don't complain of ringing of the ears per se. These patients seem to come to our hospital because of anxiety about tinnitus. In this study we determined how many tinnitus patients have anxiety as the chief complaint and compared the effect of treatment in tinnitus patients with ringing in the ear and with anxiety as the chief complaint.We designed a new questionnaire for 232 tinnitus patients graded the degree of complaint of ringing in the ear from 3 to 18: the higher the score, the greater the complaint of ringing in the ear.We divided tinnitus patients into two groups: those with scores of 9 or lower (114 patients) and those with scores above 9 (118 patients). Our questionnaire showed that the low score group was more anxious about future hearing loss or brain tumor than the high score group. In our hospital we used mainly palliative treatment for the low score group and active treatment for the high score group. However the effect of treatment was not different in the two groups.We concluded that almost half of the patients with tinnitus have anxiety as the main complaint instead of ringing in the ear. The anxiety is due to fear of hearing loss, of brain tumor, etc. We believe that frequent otological examination and periodic audiograms should be done to reduce the anxiety.
耳鼻咽喉科臨床学会の論文