בשל "הגנת זכויות יוצרים" מובא להלן קישור לתקציר המאמר. לקריאתו בטקסט מלא, אנא פנה/י לספרייה הרפואית הזמינה לך.

To our knowledge, evidence-based recommendations on the intratympanic vs systemic administration of corticosteroids for the treatment of idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss remain unestablished, and contradictory conclusions have been reported in previous meta-analyses.

We compare recovery from idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss based on systemic, intratympanic, or a combined treatment with corticosteroids as first-line treatment.

We adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines. We searched PubMed, Embase, OvidSP, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library from January 1, 1966, to July 1, 2018. This study was registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews.

We included randomized studies. Included studies must have excluded identifiable causes.

Corticosteroids must have been administered solitarily. We excluded studies that did not define hearing loss as a minimum 30 dB within 72 hours.

We identified 170 titles, of which 56 (32.9%) were eligible for full-text screening. We independently extracted data. We applied a fixed-effects model to investigate our objectives.

We aimed to (1) estimate the difference in mean pure tone average (PTA) gain in decibels from intratympanic treatment vs systemic treatment and (2) investigate odds ratios for recovery between the different treatment groups.