Partial hearing impairment in medical students and its relation to academic performance

Pure tone audiometry was done in 300 male and female students in the range of 19-22 years to find out the incidence and the degree of hearing impairment [H. I.] and it's relationship to the rural or urban origin or the sex of the subject. The H. I. was correlated to the academic performance. Incidence of 31% was detected and 95.6% of them were found to show a poor academic performance. The urban origin showed higher percentage of H. I. and also higher threshold level in the normal audiogram. No significant difference was found between male and female subjects in the occurrence of H. I. or hearing threshold, or in the right [RT] and left [Lt] ear differences