Department of Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery, Sheba Medical Center, Affiliated to Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Med Hypotheses. 2013 Jul;81(1):142-3. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2013.04.020. Epub 2013 May 10.
Malignant otitis externa (MOE) usually affect patients with systemic diseases, especially diabetes mellitus. MOE is a mainly unilateral disease. Given that around 90% of human adults are right-handed we hypothesized that hand preference might be one of the factors involved in the development of MOE. All 38 of the patients whom we treated for MOE between August 2009 and November 2012 (28 males and 10 females, age range 43-91 years) had poorly controlled diabetes mellitus, and all of them reported itching in the involved ear. The difference in the laterality of MOE among our right- and left-handed subjects was significant: right hand dominance was associated mostly with right-sided MOE (24/34) and left hand dominance was associated with occurrence of MOE only in the left ears (4/4, p=0.006). These findings point to an unexpectedly strong relationship between the patient's handedness and laterality of his/her MOE, leading us to hypothesize that the development of MOE might be attributable to self-inflicted local trauma to the ear canal on the same side as the dominant hand.
恶性外耳炎（MOE）通常影响患有系统性疾病的患者，特别是糖尿病患者。MOE 主要是单侧疾病。鉴于约 90%的成年人是右利手，我们假设手的偏好可能是 MOE 发展的因素之一。我们在 2009 年 8 月至 2012 年 11 月期间治疗的所有 38 名 MOE 患者（28 名男性和 10 名女性，年龄范围为 43-91 岁）均患有未得到良好控制的糖尿病，所有患者均报告受累耳瘙痒。我们的右利手和左利手患者 MOE 的侧别差异具有统计学意义：右利手主要与右侧 MOE 相关（24/34），而左利手仅与左耳 MOE 相关（4/4，p=0.006）。这些发现表明患者的惯用手与 MOE 的侧别之间存在出乎意料的强相关性，使我们假设 MOE 的发展可能归因于惯用手同侧的耳道口的自我创伤。
