Abstract
Hearing outcomes reporting has evolved significantly and new standards for reporting
now enable a more precise and comprehensive representation of hearing outcomes. Hearing
is one of the critical sensory domains contained within the lateral skull base and
temporal bone. For those patients with serviceable hearing, hearing preservation is
a key treatment goal. Pre- and postoperative hearing assessment is fundamental to
the diagnostic evaluation of patients preparing to undergo lateral skull base surgery.
Standardization in reporting these hearing outcomes is critical to compare the efficacy
of different treatment options for lateral skull base lesions. Over the time, reporting
of hearing outcomes has evolved from broadly categorizing patients into large groups
to comparing individual patients which requires more specific datasets to compare
pre- and posttreatment hearing outcomes. Future research in lateral skull base surgery
will benefit from precise, accurate, and easily understood reporting outcomes, all
of which will allow for more efficient comparability between studies and pooling of
data for meta-analysis.
Keywords
lateral skull base surgery - hearing - audiology - neurotology
