The effects of oral isotretinoin (13-Cis retinoic acid) on the inner ear: A prospective clinical study

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of oral isotretinoin, a drug used in the treatment of acne vulgaris, on hearing function determined by serial audiology examinations. Methods: Forty patients with acne vulgaris were included in this study. Nine patients were excluded from the study because of inconsistent follow-up. The hearing of each participant was tested with pure tone audiometry and transient evoked autoacoustic emissions before and two and four weeks after treatment with isotretinoin (0.3-0.6 mg/kg/day) in the remaining 31 patients (62 ears).Results: The differences between the mean values of the pre-treatment and post-treatment pure tone hearing thresholds at 1000, 2000, 4000 and 6000 Hz frequencies were statistically significant (p 0.05). The difference between the pre-treatment and post-treatment signal–noise ratio values of the transient evoked autoacoustic emissions was not significantly different (p > 0.05).Conclusion: Our results suggest that the use of isotretinoin may cause bilateral hearing threshold changes. Further animal and human studies are required to investigate and characterize isotretinoin-induced neurophysiological alterations in hearing.