Participants:
This study was conducted from January 2014 to August 2016. We enrolled a total of 31 ears of 20 pediatric patients (aged 3-18 years) and 102 ears of 86 adult patients (aged 24-78 years) with chronic otitis media (COM) who underwent TEES in this study. Among the subjects, 13 children (23 ears) and 23 adults (34 ears) had chronic otitis media with effusion (OME), 4 children (5 ears) and 46 adults (51 ears) had COM without cholesteatomas, and 3 children (3 ears) and 17 adults (17 ears) had cholesteatomas.
Patient characteristics are summarized in Table 1; 53% of the subjects were male. The mean ages of the pediatric and adult patients were 8.4 and 49.5 years, respectively. The most frequent procedure among the pediatric patients was VTI (74%), followed by tympanoplasty (16%), and mastoidectomy (10%); among adult patients, the majority underwent VTI (33%), followed by tympanoplasty (50%), and mastoidectomy (17%).