A Survey of Relationship between Rheumatoid Arthritis and Hearing Disorders

RA (rheumatoid arthritis) is a chronic multisystem disease with a variety of systemic manifestations. One of these manifestations, is hearing disorder, so study of the relation between RA and hearing disorders is seem important. This was a case-control study which has done from December 2004 to August 2006. This study compared 50 patients with RA, with age, sex and job-matched as control. Audiometric tests in different frequencies show that hearing threshold in high frequencies specially in 8000 Hz had a significant difference between two groups, also acoustic reflexes were absent in case groups and had significant difference between two groups too. The evaluation of sensory neural hearing loss showed that this hearing loss is sensory not neural. Based on this study, frequent evaluation of audiometric tests is recommended for controlling hearing disorders by therapeutic and rehabilitation procedures in RA patients.