Analysis of the glycerin test for Menière's disease.

The glycerin test has low sensitivity for Menière's disease using present published criteria. The purpose of this study is to compare the efficacy of standard empirical criteria with our theoretically based criteria. Subjects were 47 patients with Menière's disease and 45 patients with other causes of hearing loss and dizziness. Pure-tone thresholds and word-identification scores were determined before and 3 hours after administration of glycerin. The results were submitted to decision and multivariate discriminate analyses. The theoretically based criterion applied to pure-tone threshold testing alone was the most effective protocol for glycerin testing. Combining pure-tone thresholds and word-identification increased the false-positive rate without adequately increasing the true-positive rate, and provided no advantage over testing thresholds alone.