Intractable Ménière's disease. Modelling of the treatment by means of statistical analysis.

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the value of different variables of the clinical history, auditory and vestibular tests and handicap measurements to define intractable or disabling Ménière's disease.

METHODS

This is a prospective study with 212 patients of which 155 were treated with intratympanic gentamicin and considered to be suffering a medically intractable Ménière's disease. Age and sex adjustments were performed with the 11 variables selected. Discriminant analysis was performed either using the aforementioned variables or following the stepwise method.

RESULTS

Different variables needed to be sex and/or age adjusted and both data were included in the discriminant function. Two different mathematical formulas were obtained and four models were analyzed. With the model selected, diagnostic accuracy is 77.7%, sensitivity is 94.9% and specificity is 52.8%.

CONCLUSION

After discriminant analysis we found that the most informative variables were the number of vertigo spells, the speech discrimination score, the time constant of the VOR and a measure of handicap, the "dizziness index".