The short version
- Doctors in Luzhou, China, compared blood fats in 284 hospital patients with inner-ear hearing loss and 296 patients admitted for other ear conditions.
- Higher triglycerides and LDL cholesterol and lower HDL cholesterol went with the hearing-loss diagnoses, with HDL showing the strongest link.
- The study looked back at records from one hospital, so it shows an association, not that cholesterol causes hearing loss.
A team at Southwest Medical University and its affiliated Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital in Luzhou, Sichuan, went back through the records of ear patients admitted between 2022 and 2024 who had their blood fats tested. Writing in Frontiers in Neurology on October 28, they compared 284 patients whose main diagnosis was sensorineural hearing loss, mostly sudden hearing loss, with 296 admitted for other ear problems, from middle-ear infections to balance disorders and tinnitus.
After adjusting for age, sex, weight, blood sugar, uric acid and blood pressure, each unit rise in triglycerides carried 1.20 times the odds of a hearing-loss diagnosis, and each unit rise in LDL cholesterol 1.28 times. Each unit of HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, went with about half the odds. Patients with low HDL had 2.5 times the odds of those with normal levels. When the analysis was limited to the 231 sudden-hearing-loss cases, the HDL link was no longer statistically clear.
The authors are plain that “causal inference is not possible.” The data come from one hospital and one blood sample per patient, taken at an unknown point relative to steroid treatment. Diabetes, smoking, heart disease and statin use were not recorded as variables. The comparison group was other ear patients, not healthy people. It is the second study this month to tie routine blood tests to hearing, after one on inflammation scores in 7,920 American adults.
