Diagnosing and Treating Hearing Loss
Hearing loss can result from many different causes, some of which can be successfully treated with medicine or surgery, depending on the disease process.
The Consequences of Untreated Hearing Loss
When left untreated, hearing loss can damage your physical health, emotional well-being and professional success. This includes:
- Increasing your risk of cognitive decline
- Increasing your feelings of depression, anger and anxiety
- Reducing job performance and monetary compensation
- Leading to difficulty concentrating and storing new information
- Increasing your likelihood of suffering physical injuries, specifically falls
Many physicians believe you should make audiology evaluations a routine part of your overall health care, just like regular vision exams and dental checkups. Hearing tests are quick, painless and provide immediate results.
Types of Hearing Loss
- Conductive hearing loss when hearing loss is due to problems with the ear canal, eardrum or middle ear and its little bones (the malleus, incus and stapes).
- Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) when hearing loss is due to problems of the inner ear; also known as nerve-related hearing loss.
- Mixed hearing loss refers to a combination of conductive and sensorineural hearing loss. This means there may be damage in the outer or middle ear and in the inner ear (cochlea) or auditory nerve.
Conductive Hearing Loss
Causes:
- Malformation of outer ear, ear canal, or middle ear structures
- Fluid in the middle ear from colds
- Ear infection (otitis media) – an infection of the middle ear in which an accumulation of fluid may interfere with the movement of the eardrum and ossicles
- Allergies
- Poor Eustachian tube function
- Perforated eardrum
- Benign tumors
- Impacted earwax
- Infection in the ear canal
- Foreign body in the ear
- Otosclerosis
Treatments for Conductive Hearing Loss:
Types of conductive hearing loss include congenital absence of ear canal or failure of the ear canal to be open at birth and congenital absence, and malformation or dysfunction of the middle ear structures, all of which may possibly be surgically corrected. Hearing may also be improved with amplification with a bone conduction hearing aid, a surgically implanted device (for example, Bone Anchored Hearing Devices or Ponto System), or a conventional hearing aid, depending on the status of the hearing nerve.
Other causes of conductive hearing loss include infection, tumors, middle ear fluid from infection or Eustachian tube dysfunction, and foreign body and trauma (as in a skull fracture). Acute infections are usually treated with antibiotic or anti-fungal medications. Chronic ear infections, chronic middle ear fluid and tumors usually require surgery. If there is no response to initial medical therapy, infectious middle ear fluid is usually treated with antibiotics — while chronic non-infectious middle ear fluid is treated with surgery (or pressure equalizing tubes).
Sensorineural Hearing Loss
Causes:
- Exposure to loud noise
- Head trauma
- Virus or disease
- Autoimmune inner ear disease
- Hearing loss that runs in the family
- Aging (presbycusis)
- Malformation of the inner ear
- Meniere’s Disease
- Otosclerosis – a hereditary disorder in which a bony growth forms around a small bone in the middle ear, preventing it from vibrating when stimulated by sound.
- Tumors
Treatments of Sensorineural Hearing Loss:
Sensorineural hearing loss can result from acoustic trauma (or exposure to excessively loud noise), which may respond to medical therapy with corticosteroids to reduce cochlea hair cell swelling and inflammation to improve healing of these injured inner ear structures.
- Sensorineural hearing loss can occur from head trauma or abrupt changes in air pressure such as in airplane descent, which can cause inner ear fluid compartment rupture or leakage that may be toxic to the inner ear. There has been variable success with emergency surgery when this happens.
- Sudden sensorineural hearing loss, presumed to be of viral origin, is an emergency that is medically treated with corticosteroids.
- Bilateral progressive hearing loss over several months, also diagnosed as autoimmune inner ear disease, is managed medically with long-term corticosteroids and sometimes with drug therapy. Autoimmune inner ear disease is when the body’s immune system misdirects its defenses against the inner ear structures to cause damage in this part of the body.
- Fluctuating sensorineural hearing loss may be from an unknown cause or associated with Meniere’s disease. Symptoms of Meniere’s disease are hearing loss, tinnitus (or ringing in the ears) and vertigo. Meniere’s disease may be treated medically with a low-sodium diet, diuretics and corticosteroids. If the vertigo is not medically controlled, then various surgical procedures are used to eliminate the vertigo.
- Sensorineural hearing loss from tumors of the balance nerve adjacent to the hearing nerve generally are not reversed with surgical removal or irradiation of these benign tumors. If the hearing loss is mild and the tumors are very small, hearing may be saved in 50 percent of those undergoing hearing preservation surgery for tumor removal.
- Irreversible sensorineural hearing loss, the most common form of hearing loss, may be managed with hearing aids. When hearing aids are not enough, this type of hearing loss can be surgically treated with cochlear implants.