HEARING IMPAIRMENT AMONG YOUNG CHINESE IN A RURAL AREA

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.