الفهرس 
Aim of the workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 123 |  |  |
| | | from | 123 | | |
Abstract
Summary and Conclusion
Tinnitus is a common disorder that affects over 10% of the population.
The severity of tinnitus varies from almost nondetectable to severe and debilitating. Despite extensive study, the etiology of tinnitus is still not completely understood although the etiology of the disorder remains unclear, clinical studies have been further handicapped by a number of issues including the following:
(1) The subjective nature of the disorder makes it difficult to study and quantify.
(2) The multifactorial basis for tinnitus generation and perception makes targeting therapy very difficult.
(3) The lack of standard tinnitus assessment devices, in many centers.
Because of the difficulty in studying and quantifying tinnitus and because this disorder is a common complaint among patients, many therapies had been used with large debate on their efficacy.
Many treatment modalities had been used as hearing aid amplification, masking techniques, tinnitus retraining therapy, drug treatments as osmotic regulators and vasodilators, benzodiazepines, non-benzodiazepine anticonvulsant drugs, antispasticity drugs, antidepressants: anticholinergic drugs: and herbal extracts all had been used for treating tinnitus with different results.
The option of managing certain forms of tinnitus with intratympanic therapies was used since 1956 uptill now.
Many materials were used for that like lidocaine, gentamicin, and corticosteroids. The use of the first two drugs was stopped due to their side effects so the remaining drug corticosteroids is still being used due to its low rate of side effects and the beneficial effect on tinnitus which had been proved by many authors.
In our study we tried to investigate the effects and/or side effects of the intratympanic injection with the steroid dexamethasone on tinnitus.
We confirmed the following:
There was an improvement of tinnitus which had been shown in the results of tinnitus subjective score pre and post operatively, as a whole 23 patients (57.5%) showed significant improvement while 17 patients (42.5%) showed little or no improvement. so intra tympanic treatment with Dexamethasone was effective and beneficial for patients of subjective idiopathic tinnitus in our study.
Our results also clearly demonstrated that transtympanic steroid injection was a safe alternative therapy, especially when the tinnitus fails to be controlled by systemic drug treatment; this appears well by the little number of postoperative complications.
Recommendations:
According to these results it is recommended to use this technique whenever it is indicated depending on its inclusion criteria. It is also recommended to make new studies on intra-tympanic injection with longer periods of follow up (up to years) of improvement of tinnitus.
We also recommend making studies on intra-tympanic injection with the use of other chemical forms of corticosteroids, or the use of different protocols of injection regarding dose and/or frequency.