Regular hearing tests needed for people with rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis may lead to increased incidence of some forms of hearing loss so people with the autoimmune disease should be screened, experts suggest in Rheumatology International.

Rheumatoid arthritis can affect areas of the body other than the joints including the middle ear, cochlea and auditory nerve. So a team set out to investigate the association of rheumatoid arthritis with different types of hearing loss in over 20,000 people with rheumatoid arthritis.

They were compared to almost 80,000 healthy people and were found to be no more likely to have conductive hearing loss or mixed hearing loss. But they were four times as likely to have sensorineural hearing loss, leading to the experts to conclude that “early screening of rheumatoid arthritis patients with pure tone audiometry should be considered”.

Interested? Read more about rheumatoid arthritis here.

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