DO I HAVE pETD?

Patulous Eustachian Tube Dysfunction (PET) can make your own voice or breathing sound unusually loud inside your ear. These symptoms can be distressing, but they do not confirm PET on their own. An ear, nose and throat (ENT) clinician can assess your symptoms and rule out other causes.

Common signs of PET

Autophony: your voice echoes, booms, or sounds as though you are speaking inside a barrel or bucket.

Breathing autophony: you hear your breathing loudly in the affected ear.

Ear fullness or pressure, even though the Eustachian tube is open rather than blocked.

In some people, the eardrum moves in time with breathing.

Why does my ear feel full is there is no fluid build up?

A normally functioning middle ear often sits at a slightly negative pressure relative to the outside environment. This develops because gases in the middle-ear space are gradually absorbed into the bloodstream through the middle-ear mucosa. This gas absorption creates a natural vacuum effect in the middle ear.

With PET, the Eustachian tube remains open, and the middle ear can no longer maintain the optimal stable resting environment of negative pressure. The brain interprets these unfamiliar signals as a sense of blockage, pressure, or fullness. However, this sensation does not necessarily mean that fluid has collected or that pressure is building behind the eardrum. In PET, fullness may instead be the brain’s response to an abnormal pattern of sound, movement and pressure transmission within the middle ear.

Due to this feeling of “fullness”, PET is very often misdiagnosed as Obstructive Eustachian Tube Disorder, and therefore the patient is treated for a blocked Eustachian tube, rather than an open one. Treatments for ETD and PET have the opposite goal: the goal of ETD treatment is to open the Eustachian tube while the treatment goal for PET is to close the tube.