Association Between Chronic Kidney Disease and Incident Ménière’s Disease Using 16 Years of Nationwide Longitudinal Data

Background: Although chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been associated with several forms of auditory and vestibular impairment, its relationship with Ménière’s disease (MD) has not been well established at the population level. We investigated whether CKD is associated with subsequent development of MD in a large national cohort. Methods: Data were obtained from the Korean National Health Insurance Service–Health Screening Cohort for 2002–2019. The analysis included 15,943 participants with CKD and 63,772 comparison participants matched at a 1:4 ratio according to age, sex, household income, and region of residence. Propensity-score overlap weighting was additionally applied to balance measured baseline characteristics. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for incident MD. Results: During 67,471 person–years of follow-up in the CKD group and 330,701 person–years in the comparison group, 173 and 903 participants, respectively, developed MD. The crude HR was 0.92 (95% CI, 0.79–1.09; p = 0.346), and the overlap-weighted point estimate was 0.95 (95% CI, 0.84–1.07; p = 0.414). Conclusions: The available point estimates did not indicate a higher hazard of incident MD among participants with CKD, but the findings should be interpreted cautiously because weighted variance estimation could not be evaluated and death was not modeled as a competing event. Further studies with prospectively retained individual-level data and competing-risk analyses are warranted.