Hearing Damage

Good hearing depends on a series of events that change sound waves into electrical signals that travel through our cells and nerves to our brains. When the hair cells (cilia) or auditory nerves that make this happen are damaged, your hearing is affected. Most people think of hearing loss (deafness) when the ear is damaged, but you can have other symptoms, too. You may hear a ringing or roaring sound. Most cases of hearing damage in those over 65 are caused by aging and heredity, but doctors are increasingly concerned about hearing damage in young patients, such as those who are exposed to loud on-the-job noises or recreational noise). It's important to understand the causes of hearing loss and what you can do to prevent it.

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QDo hearing aids work for all hearing problems?

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A Challenge America answered

If you are diagnosed with hearing loss, a hearing aid might help you to be an active participant in life. Hearing aids can help those with mild to severe hearing loss. While a hearing aid cannot fill in the gap for the hearing loss, it can help magnify what you can hear and improve your quality of life.

With a hearing aid, you are in control. You can change the volume and turn it off and on as you please. The style of today’s hearing aid blends in on most people, whether it is in the ear (ITE), in the canal (ITC), behind the ear (BTE) or part of your eyewear.

The in-the-canal (ITC) hearing aid fits the size and shape of your ear, so it is virtually hidden. A modified version of this is a completely-in-canal (CIC) hearing aid. The in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aid fits directly into the outer ear. Typically, the behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aid is inside of a small curved case that fits behind your ear. Because BTE hearing aids are more powerful, they may be better for people with severe hearing loss.

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QWhat are the disadvantages of hearing aids?

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A UCLA Health answered

Disadvantages of hearing aids include that they don't block out background noise, they don't separate speech and noise in noisy environments and they don't allow people to hear sounds at a distance.

Hearing aids are necessary to address hearing loss, but they're insufficient. There are lots of other things that help with good communication and make communication successful. Hearing aids make things louder, and they make sounds sound sharper, especially high-frequency consonants, but hearing aids don't block out background noise. That's a very common misperception that may be fed by some of the advertising seen in the newspaper. Hearing aids don't have a brain. They don't know what people want to hear and what they don't want to hear, so they amplify all the sound that's in the environment. Hearing aids don't do a good job of separating speech and noise under noisy circumstances, and they don't do a good job of allowing people to hear sounds that are at a distance.
QWhat should I expect from a new hearing aid?

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A UCLA Health answered

When you get a new hearing aid, initially you may feel that things sound very funny. But if you wear your hearing aids every day, for most of the time that you're awake or all the time that you're awake, your brain will very rapidly become accustomed to the sound that it's hearing. It begins to use that new information in a way to make sound and speech more easily heard and more easily understood. But it does take practice. You don't just put hearing aids on and away you go hearing well. You begin to retrain your ears, and more importantly, retrain your brain how to listen and how to interpret sounds that perhaps you haven't been hearing for many years.

Hearing aids don't provide normal hearing, and if you have hidden hearing loss with no change on your hearing test or no abnormality on your audiogram, hearing aids may or may not be helpful. So that's definitely something to discuss with your audiologist. There may be other technologies that you can use that might be more helpful, for instance, a remote microphone to better pick up speech at a distance or in noise.
QWhat sounds get harder to hear with age?

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A UCLA Health answered

Typically with age-related or noise-induced hearing loss, the damage occurs in the high frequency or high-pitched sounds, and those are the words that give meaning to the sentence or to what is being said. It's the high-frequency consonants that actually make the words mean something. So, if the phrase, "Please sit down on the chair," is said to someone who has a high-frequency hearing loss, they might hear something like, "Ease it own on uh air." It doesn't make any sense. That's because all the high-frequency consonants have been filtered out by the hearing loss. Hearing in the low pitches stays relatively good, so the vowel sounds in speech, A-E-I-O-U, are low-pitched and easy to understand and easy to hear.
QWhat causes hearing loss?

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A Sigma Nursing answered

Genetics and damage from a variety of sources can cause hearing impairment. The children of a deaf parent can inherit deafness. Pregnancy and childbirth complications can cause hearing impairment, such as prematurity, oxygen deprivation, jaundice, infections. Chronic ear infections can damage the ear to the point of hearing loss. Infectious diseases like measles, mumps and meningitis can impair hearing, most often in children. Taking ototoxic drugs at any time can affect hearing ability. Sometimes hearing impairment is caused temporarily by blockage of the ear canal by wax or more permanently by the insertion of an object in the ear. Exposure to excessively loud noise (music, gunfire, explosions, machinery) can hurt the inner ear's ability to function. Age can also be a factor in hearing impairment after prolonged noise exposure over the years.

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QHow often do I need to change the batteries in my hearing aid?

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A UCLA Health answered

How often you need to change the batteries in your hearing aid depends on the hearing aid. Some hearing aids use very small batteries, so the batteries may only last for two or three days. For hearing aids with larger batteries, the battery may last a week to 10 days. Some people stream music through their phone into their hearing aids, or they stream their telephone calls into their hearing aids. That will drain the batteries more rapidly. But at night when you remove your hearing aids, if you open the battery door, it disconnects the battery and makes sure that the battery is not draining through the night.
QWill my hearing get better if I wear hearing aids?

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A UCLA Health answered

If you wear hearing aids, your hearing loss will not get better. That is, your hearing loss in your ear will not get better, but what will get better is your ability to be a good listener, to understand speech more effortlessly and to be more responsive when people talk to you or have a conversation with you. So, that's not your ear getting better; rather, it's the part of your brain that understands speech that will be stimulated and will be more responsive to conversations and to what's being said.
QCan people see my hearing aids when I wear them?

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A UCLA Health answered

People will not see your hearing aids when you wear them unless they stare into your ear. But nobody stares into somebody's ear, except maybe an audiologist. In typical use and typical sizes of hearing aids, most people are not aware that somebody's even wearing a hearing aid. Hearing aids either sit behind the ear with a very thin wire that goes into the ear to deliver the sound, or the hearing aid sits completely within the ear or within the ear canal. These are not like your grandmother's hearing aids that were great big boxes worn in her pocket with a wire. The size of the hearing aid really depends on your ear because they're custom-made for your ear.
QWhat kind of age-related hearing loss can be treated surgically?

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A UCLA Health answered

Age-related hearing loss is not medically or surgically treatable. There are no vitamins or herbs or medicines that can make age-related hearing loss better. The only exception to that rule would be if an individual has very severe or profound hearing loss in both ears—they may be a candidate for a cochlear implant, which is a surgical procedure. This is unusual, but if an audiologist suggests looking into a cochlear implant, that certainly is something that is worth following up on.
QHow can I understand people when they are speaking if I have hearing loss?

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A UCLA Health answered

There are some things you can do to facilitate understanding someone who's speaking to you if you have hearing loss. By looking at the face and facial expression, you are also lip-reading. Some people say that they can't lip-read, but we all do on maybe a subconscious level. We look to the speaker for facial expression and lip movement, which helps to clarify what's being said. If you don't understand what people say, don't hesitate to ask them to repeat what they've said or ask them to say the same idea using different words to help clarify what they're trying to communicate. Importantly, don't fake it. There's nothing worse than responding to a person who says something, and maybe you didn't quite understand it, so you nod and smile and say "yeah." Maybe the right answer really should have been a look of horror and "Oh my gosh, no!" So faking it can be dangerous.