Acute Deafness: What Can The Doctor Do?
As soon as you think in the diagnosis of acute deafness, the patient must be addressed urgently. This includes the implementation of a treatment called cochlear support (intended to prevent injury to the cochlea progress), and performing a check:
- Complete blood count, including sugar and lipids (cholesterol, total lipids).
- Repetition of audiometric testing every 48 hours.
- Repetition of audiometric testing auditory evoked every 48 horas.Potenciales (a specific technique that detects how come the sound signals to the brain) if the loss is less than 60 dB (decibels).
- MRI brain with injection of gadolinium (a contrast), looking for an acoustic neuroma.
It has several therapeutic measures, but none has proved superior in terms of recovery rates. In addition to therapeutic abstention (no treatment) showed a recovery rate close to that of the different treatments. Apart from bed rest for 4 or 5 days and mild anxiolytic prescribing, the treatments available are:
Normovolemic hemodilution: the principle is to dilute the normal components of blood, maintaining a constant blood volume, in order to increase blood flow to tissues deprived of oxygen. This technique is complicated, not proven to be superior to the others.
Plasticity of red blood cells: improving the plasticity (the facility to change its form without rupture) of red blood cells with drugs called hemorheological, which are most often prescribed initially intravenously.
Carbogen: a potent vasodilator (increases blood vessel diameter), which improves blood oxygenation of vital structures of the inner ear. It is a mixture of oxygen (90%) and CO2 (10%).
Systemic vasodilators: are agents that lower the tone of the blood vessel wall and increasing the arteriolar perfusion (irrigation of smaller vessels) of the tissues deprived of oxygen.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy: is to make the patient breathe oxygen under pressure. Thus, oxygen is used directly by the tissues suffer.
Treatment with corticosteroids, used by most physicians for 7 to 10 days, for its antiinflammatory effect.