Management of tinnitus in children: Review of literature and effect of counseling.

OBJECTIVE: Tinnitus in children has not been studied sufficiently to date. And, there is no consensus regarding the management of tinnitus in children. Tinnitus counseling can be considered as the most basic tool among therapeutic options of tinnitus in children. In this article, the importance of management in children with tinnitus is highlighted through the review of the literature. Also, we present survey results regarding usefulness and necessity of tinnitus counseling provided from parents of children with tinnitus.

METHODS: Studies reporting the management of pediatric tinnitus were reviewed by searching the Pubmed (MEDLINE) databases for studies published from 1980 through 2017. Three articles were eligible for review in terms of quantitative measurement of tinnitus improvement. Survey for eighteen participants were performed who visited our clinic, improvement by counseling and subjective benefit were evaluated by questionnaire. Various demographic and audiologic parameters were subjected into correlation analysis of benefit of counseling.

RESULTS: Three studies which included management of pediatric tinnitus were reviewed. One article reported that children with hearing loss failed to show improvement of tinnitus by hearing aids. However, recent two articles showed that children with or without hearing loss showed fair improvement of tinnitus by tinnitus retraining therapy and noise generator. The survey demonstrated that overall 83.3% showed subjective improvement by tinnitus counseling. Among demographic and audiological parameters, benefit from counseling was significantly associated with age and presence of hearing loss (p=0.037 and p=0.005, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS: Pediatric tinnitus is likely to have a higher chance of improvement by counseling alone or combination therapy without medication. Conservative management of tinnitus based on education and counseling instead of medical or surgical treatment should be developed more.