Bilateral aspects of Meniére's disease. Meniére's disease with bilateral fluctuant hearing loss

Abstract

Although bilateral involvement of Meniére's disease is serious enough to produce deafness in both ears, actually little attention has been directed to such involvement. Recently, several reports have been made concerning the bilateral aspects of this disease (1-8). However, lacking mutual agreeable diagnostic criteria for making these reports and differences in characteristics of patients with Meniére's disease among institutes makes it difficult to establish definitive interpretations. In 1988, the Vestibular Disorder Research Committee made a survey among 15 committee member institutes using the same diagnostic criteria of bilateral involvement of Meniére's disease. Based on the results obtained, in this paper, incidence and characteristics of bilateral cases in Meniére's disease will be discussed.