Balloon dilation of the eustachian tube: A tympanometric outcomes analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Eustachian tube dysfunction (ETD) is a common medical issue, occurring in at least 1% of the adult population. Patients suffering from ET dysfunction typically present with complaints of hearing loss or sensation of pressure or plugged ear, which can lead to impaired quality of life. Over time ETD can result in conductive hearing loss or choleastatoma formation. Effective theraputic options for ET dysfunction are few. Eustachian tube balloon dilation is a novel surgical technique being used to treat ETD. The aim of our study is to objectively measure the success of Eustachian tube balloon dilation by comparing pre and post-operative middle ear pressures using tympanometric testing. METHODS: RA retrospective chart review was preformed on all patients who underwent balloon dilation of the Eustachian tube by authors NC or MB from 2010 to 2014. Pre and post-operative tympanograms were analyzed and categorized based on type (Type A, Type B, Type C). Success was defined by an improvement in tympanogram type: Type B or C to Type A, or Type B to type C. Pre and post-operative tympanograms were further analyzed using middle ear pressure values. Follow-up ranged from 3 to 15 months. RESULTS: Twenty-five ears (18 patients) were included in the study. Overall 36% of ears had improvement in tympanogram type, and 32% had normalization of tympanogram post-operatively. The Jerger tympanogram type improved significantly following the procedure (p = 0.04). Patients also had statistically significant improvement in measured middle ear pressure post-operatively (P = 0.003). CONCLUSION: The natural history of Eustachian tube dysfunction is poorly understood, and evidence for current treatments are limited. Eustachian tube balloon dilation is a safe procedure, and produces significant improvement in tympanogram values up to 15 months post-operatively. Further refinement of patient selection and standardization of technique is required to optimize the effect of this therapy. Longterm follow-up data will clarify the persistence of the effect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".