Association of Chronic Kidney Disease with Prior Tinnitus: A Case-Control Study

This study aims to explore the relationship between prior tinnitus and the occurrence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) using a nationwide, population-based case-control study. We used data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database to explore the association of CKD with tinnitus. We identified 15,314 patients aged ≥ 40 years old with a first-time diagnosis of CKD as cases. We used propensity-scored matching to select 45,942 controls (1:3 ratio). We performed multivariate logistic regression to estimate the odds ratio (OR) of a prior tinnitus diagnosis among the CKD group vs control group. Analysis showed that 770 (1.26%) out of the 61,256 sampled patients had previously diagnosed tinnitus. Chi-square test revealed a significant difference in the rate of previously diagnosed tinnitus between cases and controls (3.86% vs. 0.93%, p<0.001). Univariate logistic regression analysis showed an OR of prior tinnitus for cases of 10.249 (95% confidence interval [CI]: (8.662 ~ 12.126)) relative to controls. In adjsuted analysis, cases were more likely than controls to have a prior diagnosis of tinnitus (OR=10.970, 95% CI=9.255 ~ 13.004, p<0.001) after adjusting for age, sex, monthly income, geographic location, urbanization level, hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, hyperlipidemia, obesity and autoimmune disease. Our study shows that persons with tinnitus are at higher risk of a subsequent diagnosis of CKD. Patients diagnosed with tinnitus may benefit from proactive measures to prevent CKD and detect it early through lifestyle modifications and regular renal function examinations regardless of CKD-related symptoms.