Hearing Outcomes Reporting in Lateral Skull Base Surgery

Hearing outcomes reporting has evolved significantly and new standards for reporting now enable a more precise and comprehensive representation of hearing outcomes. Hearing is one of the critical sensory domains contained within the lateral skull base and temporal bone. For those patients with serviceable hearing, hearing preservation is a key treatment goal. Pre- and postoperative hearing assessment is fundamental to the diagnostic evaluation of patients preparing to undergo lateral skull base surgery. Standardization in reporting these hearing outcomes is critical to compare the efficacy of different treatment options for lateral skull base lesions. Over the time, reporting of hearing outcomes has evolved from broadly categorizing patients into large groups to comparing individual patients which requires more specific datasets to compare pre- and posttreatment hearing outcomes. Future research in lateral skull base surgery will benefit from precise, accurate, and easily understood reporting outcomes, all of which will allow for more efficient comparability between studies and pooling of data for meta-analysis.