Chronic suppurative otitis media and the pathologic labyrinthine fistula

Abstract

Abstract Chronic suppurative otitis media is a dangerous illness. By location, it jeopardizes the middle ear ossicles, the facial nerve, the inner ear, and endocranially, the dural vessels, meninges and brain parenchyma. It is a regard for this infection and the prevention of these complications that dictates an eradication of the illness by surgical intervention; yet, on occasion, one or more of these complications occur and while the proper way to handle most of them has been stressed periodically in the recent literature, one complication, the labyrinthine fistula, has received little attention since the pre–antibiotic days; 1,2 thus, surgery has a two–fold function, being therapeutic for the infection and prophylactic for the complications.