Indirect immunofluorescence in the investigation of rapidly progressive sensorineural hearing loss and Menière's disease.

Being aware of the conservation of antigenicity, we performed indirect immunofluorescence on non fixed non decalcified frozen hamster's cochlea. Once killed, the heads of the hamsters were immediately dipped into liquid nitrogen and then stored at -20 degrees C until cutting. The sections were done at the same temperature, with Tissue-Tek embedding the heads to avoid breaking, using a sharp tungsten knife. The immunofluorescence itself was performed with the sera of the patients which were revealed through donkey fluorescein-conjugated antiserum to human immunoglobulins. For counterstaining, we used Evans blue. Twenty patients with rapidly progressive sensorineural hearing loss (according to the clinical criteria of MacCabe) and 6 with Menière's disease were tested. Five had a specific fluorescence on the stria vascularis. A correlation with the lymphocyte transformation test on human inner ear antigen has been found (p = 0.055).