There are primarily three types of hearing loss. Your hearing aid professional can identify your hearing loss type and make suitable recommendations for the treatment so that it is properly managed. There are three crucial hearing loss kinds help describe the underlying problem and perform a proper diagnosis.
Sensorineural Hearing Loss
This is the most common type of hearing loss problem and is often a permanent loss. This takes place when there is damage to the tiny hairlike cells of the inner ear or auditory nerve itself. This prevents and weakens nerve signals of the brain. The blocked nerve signals, essentially carry information about the clarity and loudness of sounds.
Causes:
It is the genetic syndrome due to which a child is born with this hearing loss. This is a condition where an infection is passed from the mother to the fetus in the womb such as herpes, rubella, and toxoplasmosis. When this Hearing Loss happens later in life, it can result from various triggers including the following:
- Blood vessel diseases
- Aging
- Autoimmune diseases
- Noise exposure
- Traumatic injuries
- Infections such as mumps, measles, scarlet fever, meningitis
- Side effects caused from certain medicines
- Exposure to loud noise for an extended period of time
- Acoustic neuroma
- Meniere’s disease
What are the symptoms?
The symptoms gradually affect both the clarity of sounds as well as its loudness:
- Any noise might seem to be too harsh or too soft
- Difficulty in following a conversation when more than one person is involved
- Difficulty paying attention to the noise in the environment you are in.
- Speech of the speakers might seem mumbled or slurred
- Feeling the dizzy or off balance.
- Difficulty in hearing children or women’s voices
- Certain specific sounds are difficult to be heard during the conversation
Conductive Hearing loss
This is comparatively a lot less common compared to the former one. This occurs with an obstruction or damage caused to the middle or outer ear that prevents sound from being conducted to the inner ear. This might be temporary or permanent, depending on its cause.
Causes
Outer ear
- Narrowing or stenosis of the ear canal
- Otitis externa
- Exostoses
- Wax impaction
- Obstructions caused due to foreign bodies
Middle ear
- A breach in tympanic membrane caused due to ear infections, injury or rapid changes in air pressure
- Thickening of the tympanic membrane
- Otitis Media or build-up of fluid in the middle ear
Mixed Hearing loss
This is a combined kind of hearing loss of the above two.
Causes
This commonly occurs with the ear having sustained to a specific type of trauma. This can happen gradually over time with one hearing loss compounding by the other. An individual with a long-standing conductive hearing problem can experience presbycusis with aging. On the contrary, an individual with the sensorineural hearing problem may face a temporary hearing loss as a result of wax impaction.
Symptoms
It is a combination of symptoms experienced in the above two problems.
There are treatments available for these common kinds of hearing problems. Refer to a qualified Audiologist at Victorian Hearing to help solve your problems.