To evaluate hearing levels in Chinese young people, audiometry was car
ried out at a rural village in Shandong Prefecture. The subjects were
282 healthy school children and students ranging in age from 7-17 y. A
ll 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 associa
tions between questions in the questionnaire and hearing impairment. F
ifty-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 hearin
g impairment was found when compared with young Japanese (1% from the
nationwide school health survey) and with young Chinese in Shandong Pr
efecture (0.5%). In the questionnaire, 4 questions on dizziness, head
trauma, aminoglycoside administration, and suspicion of Meniere's synd
rome, were included in the cluster of hearing impairment. The cause of
this hearing impairment was proposed to be the potentiating effects o
f aminoglycoside antibiotics and exposure to noise.