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.