Modeling the Occurrence of Ear Injuries.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a therapeutic modality that allows an increase of perfusion of O2 in tissues reducing edema and tissue hypoxia, aiding the treatment of ischemia and infection. The middle ear barotraumatism a complication that can happen under the aim of this therapy. The objectives of the present work are to determine incidence and severity and to identify predictors of risk for barotraumatism of the middle ear in a large population of patients undergoing routine hyperbaric oxygen therapy. This work studied the clinical characteristics of 1732 patients who underwent treatment at the Portuguese Navy's Center for Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine between 2012 and 2016, to characterize the incidence, severity and recurrence of middle ear barotraumatism relativelly to age, gender, clinical indication for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, personal history of allergic rhinitis and symptomatology of nasal obstruction at the time of the occurrence. Several statistical techniques were adopted. Here the generalized linear models technique was applied. We could identify some risk factors, for example, female gender, diagnosis of osteorradionecrosis of the mandible and personal history of allergic rhinitis were identified as risk factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]