NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Sudden judicial examination loss might be tied to some underlying sleep disorder that interrupts wish, suggests a new study from Taiwan.

Consulting a wide health insurance database, researchers found that persons who'd suffered sudden deafness were greater amount of likely to have a previous diagnosis of doze apnea than a comparison group on the outside of hearing loss.

The absolute difference was puny: 1.7 percent of those with hearing loss had sleep apnea, compared to 1.2 percent destitute of hearing trouble.

"If there is unanticipated hearing loss, I would investigate the state-room of apnea as well, given that it's graceful to diagnose and it's not formal to treat," said Dr. Seva Polotsky, a sleep apnea researcher from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore who wasn't involved in the recently made known study.

"Obviously we don't be assured of from this paper whether treating apnea resoluteness reduce hearing loss," or the hazard of having hearing problems in the elementary place.

For now, he said, "There are again questions than answers."

Polotsky added, it's likely that sleep apnea, which is known to augment the buildup of plaque in lineage vessels, could affect vessels in areas of the brain that curb hearing, or vessels that feed the nerves amenable for hearing.

But he said further research will be needed to obtain out what could be behind this tie -- or whether something besides the apnea, itself, might explain an increased risk of deafness.

There are here and there 4,000 new cases of rapid deafness each year in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health, and in that place are many possible causes, including infections and beginning injuries.

Typically the deafness only occurs in some ear, and most people regain their hearing distance over a period of weeks, at a past period aided by steroid treatment. But sometimes the hearing loss becomes more solemn.

Looking at health records of the same million Taiwanese, researchers led by Dr. Jau-Jiuan Sheu, of Taipei Medical University Hospital, fix almost 3,200 had been diagnosed through sudden deafness between 2000 and 2008. For harvested land of those people, they picked in a puzzle another five of the same a hundred years and sex without hearing loss to labor for as a comparison.

Out of those 19,000 mob in total, 240 had been diagnosed through sleep apnea before the episode of unlooked for deafness occurred.

When researchers took into advantage. health and lifestyle factors that may have ~ing related to both sleep problems and judicial examination loss -- such as obesity and resolution disease -- they found that men by sudden deafness were 48 percent to a greater degree likely to have a previous lie in the grave apnea diagnosis than men without sense of ~ loss.

The association for women was ~ amount clear, the researchers reported in the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.

Sleep apnea is characterized by closing off of the airways for the period of sleep, leading to repeated drops in oxygen levels in the noble extraction and frequent short wake-ups, simultaneously with snoring. It's often treated with a mask and breathing device, called unbroken positive airway pressure, or CPAP, still one of the most effective treatments is efficacy loss.

The new study doesn't confirm that sleep apnea causes sudden hearing loss. The researchers couldn't ground for people's smoking and intemperate habits, for example, which may affect the put in peril of both conditions.

Sheu and colleagues speculated, still, that inflammation and changes in disposition vessels linked to sleep apnea could contribute to the risk of deafness.

Tinnitus, the excitement of ringing in the ears, has been linked to circulatory disorders, as antidote to example.

Polotsky added that most of the complications associated by sleep apnea, which include high line pressure and diabetes, are thought to termination from frequent oxygen fluctuations during the adversity.

And sudden hearing loss could sudden into that category, he told Reuters Health.

But the current study, Polotsky reported, "doesn't really establish that. It virtuous shows us a new potential circuit to research."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/AgF7gE Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, January 2012.

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