Pregnancy-induced deafness medical myth, doctor says

Local otologist Dr. William Lippy links medical assumption to Nazi eugenics.
WARREN -- Research suggests that a long-standing medical assumption linking pregnancy to an increased risk of a hearing-loss disease in women is not true.
The study, conducted by otologist Dr. William Lippy of Warren, tied the assumption to a decision made by Nazi Germany's eugenics program, which promoted a social philosophy that the manipulation of reproduction helps "improve" the human species.
For decades, physicians believed that pregnant women with otosclerosis, a disease of the ear bone that limits vibration to transmit sound, are at risk for greater hearing loss.
Dr. Lippy discovered a document from a 1939 seminar held by German physicians that was taken by the Nazi Party as the source of the misinformation.
He said it was a Nazi desire to purify the Aryan race and to get rid of genetic diseases that surfaced the correlation between pregnancy and hearing loss.
Many women with otosclerosis were sterilized or had abortions.
"As late as the 1950s, physicians were still offering abortion as an option," Dr. Lippy said.
While teaching in Israel, otologists realized that there appeared to be no difference in hearing loss between women who had otosclerosis and many children and women who had the disease and no children.
Research
Dr. Lippy studied the hearing of 94 women in the United States who were operated on between 1998 and 2003 for otosclerosis. Only half of the women were mothers. Dr. Lippy and his colleagues did not find a correlation between the number of children and hearing loss.
He said another reason why the assumption continued for so long was because of women's tendencies to relate events in their lives to their pregnancies.
"When you ask a woman when she lost her hearing she will say, 'During my first pregnancy.' She will say she moved after her second pregnancy. Men will say, 'I broke my leg in high school. I met my wife-to-be in college,'" Dr. Lippy said. "Men tend to mark their milestones by education and where they are working. Women tend to mark milestones by pregnancies."
He added that the nature of the questionnaires given to hearing loss patients influenced reports that nearly half of the mothers lost their hearing after their first child. This perpetrated the myth.
Otosclerosis also affects women twice as often as men, and half a million women in the United States have the disease, according to HealthDay, a news and information company and a division of ScoutNews, LCC based in Norwalk, Conn.
Dr. Lippy said his study is important because it will diminish some of the fears that women have about having children when they are diagnosed with otosclerosis.
He presented his findings at the Triological Society's annual meeting May 16 in Boca Raton, Fla.. He said he plans on adding more people to the study soon.