The effects of oral isotretinoin (13-Cis retinoic acid) on the inner ear: a prospective clinical study.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of oral isotretinoin, a drug used in the treatment of acne vulgaris, on hearing function determined by serial audiology examinations.

METHODS

Forty patients with acne vulgaris were included in this study. Nine patients were excluded from the study because of inconsistent follow-up. The hearing of each participant was tested with pure tone audiometry and transient evoked autoacoustic emissions before and two and four weeks after treatment with isotretinoin (0.3-0.6 mg/kg/day) in the remaining 31 patients (62 ears).

RESULTS

The differences between the mean values of the pre-treatment and post-treatment pure tone hearing thresholds at 1000, 2000, 4000 and 6000 Hz frequencies were statistically significant (p < 0.05), but there was no significant difference between the pre-treatment and post-treatment values at 250 and 500 Hz frequencies (p > 0.05). The difference between the pre-treatment and post-treatment signal-noise ratio values of the transient evoked autoacoustic emissions was not significantly different (p > 0.05).

CONCLUSION

Our results suggest that the use of isotretinoin may cause bilateral hearing threshold changes. Further animal and human studies are required to investigate and characterize isotretinoin-induced neurophysiological alterations in hearing.