Limitations
First, an anxiety and depression scale was not used to score the
subject’s mental state, which may have impacted the analysis of the
influencing factors. Second, most of the patients enrolled in this study
had severe hearing loss, and the hearing recovery rate was low, which
may result in a bias in the analysis of the relationship between hearing
recovery and tinnitus prognosis. Thirdly, this study is a retrospective
analysis and mainly relied on the subjective recall of patients, which
could cause a recall bias in the statistical analysis. Furthermore, the
follow-up interval in this study was relatively long at nearly 2 years,
which can only reflect the status of tinnitus during the follow-up and
illustrate the trend of tinnitus outcomes but cannot accurately locate
the time point when tinnitus began to improve.