Efficacy of evaluation of audiometric results after stapes surgery in otosclerosis. II. A method for reporting results from individual cases

To standardize the reporting of hearing results after middle ear surgery, t he Committee on Hearing and Equilibrium of the American Academy of Otolaryn gology-Head and Neck Surgery proposed 2 levels of guidelines: level 1 for r eporting summary data and level 2 for reporting raw data. The Committee enc ourages the reporting of raw data from each individual case. However, in st udies in which the examined population is too large, this can yield difficu lties. With respect to this point, we designed a method for a simple visual presentation of hearing results in an attempt to provide data from each in dividually operated ear in a patient group. In this method the relation bet ween the preoperative and postoperative bone-conduction levels is evaluated to assess overclosure and iatrogenic cochlear damage, and the relation bet ween postoperative gain in air conduction and the preoperative air-bone gap is evaluated as a measure of technical success rate. This results in 2 plo ts, which we called the Amsterdam Hearing Evaluation Plots, Audiometric dat a from 451 stapes operations were used to demonstrate the use of the Amster dam Hearing Evaluation Plots.