Hearing Loss: Causes, Types, and Treatment

To say that hearing loss is common is a bit of an understatement. In the United States, 48 million individuals report some extent of hearing loss. This means, on average, for every five people you encounter, one will have hearing loss. And at the age of 65, it’s one out of three.

With odds like this, how can you prevent becoming one of those five?

To help you understand how to conserve healthy hearing throughout your life, we’ll take a look at the causes and types of hearing loss in this week’s blog post.

How Normal Hearing Works

Hearing loss is the disturbance of normal hearing, so an appropriate place to begin is with an understanding of how normal hearing is supposed to work.

You can picture normal hearing as comprised of three chief processes:

1. The physical and mechanical transmission of sound waves. Sound waves are created in the environment and travel through the air, like ripples in a lake, ultimately making their way to the external ear, through the ear canal, and finally striking the eardrum. The vibrations from the eardrum are then transmitted to the middle ear bones, which then activate the tiny nerve cells of the cochlea, the snail-shaped organ of the inner ear.
2. The electrical conduction from the inner ear to the brain. The cochlea, once activated, translates the vibrations into electrical signals that are delivered to the brain via the auditory nerve.
3. The perception of sound within the brain. The brain perceives the electrochemical signal as sound.

What’s interesting is that what we perceive as sound is nothing more than sound waves, oscillations, electric current, and chemical reactions. It’s an entirely physical process that leads to the emergence of perception.

The Three Ways Normal Hearing Can Go Wrong

There are three main types of hearing loss, each disrupting some component of the normal hearing process:

1. Conductive hearing loss
2. Sensorineural hearing loss
3. Mixed hearing loss (a combination of conductive and sensorineural)

Let’s take a look at the first two, including the causes and treatment of each.

Conductive Hearing Loss

Conductive hearing loss interferes with the physical and mechanical conduction of sound waves to the inner ear and cochlea. This is attributed to anything that obstructs conduction.

Examples include malformations of the outer ear, foreign objects inside of the ear canal, fluid from ear infections, perforated eardrums, impacted earwax, and benign tumors, among other causes.

Treatment of conductive hearing loss includes the removal of the obstruction, dealing with the infection, or surgical correction of the malformation of the outer ear, the eardrum, or the middle ear bones.

If you have conductive hearing loss, for example from impacted earwax, you could start hearing better immediately after a professional cleaning. With the omission of the more serious varieties of conductive hearing loss, this form can be the easiest to treat and can restore normal hearing entirely.

Sensorineural Hearing Loss

Sensorineural hearing loss disrupts the electrical conduction of sound from the cochlea to the brain. This is caused by deterioration to either the nerve cells within the cochlea or to the auditory nerve itself.

With sensorineural hearing loss, the brain is provided with compromised electrical signals, limiting the volume and clarity of sound.

The main causes of sensorineural hearing loss are:

• Genetic syndromes or fetal infections
• Normal aging (presbycusis)
• Infections and traumatic injuries
• Meniere’s disease
• Cancerous growths of the inner ear
• Side effects of medication
• Sudden exposure to exceedingly loud sounds
• Long-term exposure to loud sounds

Sensorineural hearing loss is typically connected with direct exposure to loud sounds, and so can be prevented by keeping away from those sounds or by protecting your hearing with earplugs.

This form of hearing loss is a bit more challenging to treat. There are no current surgical or medical procedures to repair the nerve cells of the inner ear. However, hearing aids and cochlear implants are very effective at taking on the amplification functions of the nerve cells, generating the perception of louder, sharper sound.

The third type of hearing loss, mixed hearing loss, is essentially some combination of conductive and sensorineural hearing loss, and is treated accordingly.

If you have any struggle hearing, or if you have any ear discomfort or lightheadedness, it’s a good idea to talk with your doctor or hearing professional right away. In almost every instance of hearing loss, you’ll attain the best results the sooner you attend to the underlying issue.