What Causes Hearing Loss
This isn’t the only way seniors suffer from hearing loss, though. There are many reasons why hearing issues may develop in an older age, including:
Exposure To Noise
Overexposure to noise can cause hearing loss. Typically, consistent noise above 85 dB is what really does the damage. The noise damages the hair-like cells that exist in the ear and causes a gradual loss of hearing.
Genetic
Hearing issues may just run in your family.
Trauma
Suffering trauma to the head, especially the skull, can disturb the way your vestibulocochlear nerve transmits information to the brain. It can also damage your ossicles or eardrums, which are part of the sound-transmitting process.
Build-Up Of Fluid
The build-up can occur on the outer portion (wax, blood) or inner part (via disease) of your ear that can affect how sound moves through the ear.
Pressure
Pressure to various parts of your ear, typically from dropping to lower attitudes (like divers consistently existing in high-pressure environments underwater), can permanently damage your ear.
Antibiotics
Consuming large amounts of Vicodin, aspirin, chemotherapy drugs, and other medications can damage the hair-like cells in your inner ear.
Disease
Autoimmune issues, diabetes, and leukemia can damage your ear from within. There’s also an ear disease called Meniere’s disease that affects one ear at a time that causes vertigo, ringing, and pressure.
Infections
When infections occur in the ear (like ones that occur from a buildup of fluid) or throughout the body (like herpes, mumps, measles, the flu, and more), your hearing can be permanently damaged.
Signs And Symptoms Of Hearing Loss
Hearing loss reveals itself in many forms. In fact, they can creep up so slowly that you may not even notice you have hearing loss until it starts to take a significant toll on you.
Some signs of hearing loss include:
- Difficulty hearing conversation, both in person and over the phone
- Needing to turn the volume up on the television to extremely loud levels
- Difficulty hearing softer-speaking people
- Needing people to speak louder and slower to help you process the information
- Trouble hearing consonants (according to the Mayo Clinic)
- Tendency to think people are mumbling
- Exiting conversations because it’s hard to keep up
The symptoms of hearing loss manifest themselves in more physical, potentially painful, ways. These symptoms can often coincide with illnesses like the common cold and other infections, and they include:
- A constant ringing sound in one or both ears
- Nausea
- Dizziness
- Vomiting
- A pain in and around the ear
- A buildup of fluid, sort of feeling like there’s water in your ear
These symptoms may point to different forms of hearing loss. For instance, leaking fluid may indicate conductive hearing loss as there could be a buildup of fluid within the canal. On the other hand, a constant pain or ringing can mean that there’s an infection deep inside the ear.
How Hearing Loss Can Affect Your Daily Life
Hearing loss can begin to really affect your daily life when it develops into disabling hearing loss. This occurs in adults when they incur a loss of hearing 40 decibels (dB), a unit of sound, in their best ear.
For instance, a normal conversation occurs at about 60 dB, according to the NIDCD. Someone with disabling hearing loss needs more than 100 dB—about the loudness of max volume on a music player—to hear this conversation without any aid. The different levels of hearing loss are categorized as follows:
- Mild hearing loss: Loss of 21 to 40 dBs, difficulty hearing sounds like a human breathing
- Disabling hearing loss: Loss of 40 to 55 dBs, difficulty hearing in-person conversations
- Moderately severe hearing loss: Loss of 56 to 70 dBs, difficulty hearing televisions at moderate volume
- Severe hearing loss: Loss of 71 to 90 dBs, difficulty hearing loud traffic
- Profound hearing loss: Loss of more the 90 dBs, it’s difficult to hear loud engines and orchestras (in a pit) at this point
Not being able to hear or having difficulty hearing normal sounds like the door opening, a simple conversation, or the television on a normal volume can really start to affect how elderly people experience their daily lives.
Social Aspects
Having difficulty hearing can cause issues in your social life. To put it simply, it’s hard to interact with people on a fluid basis when you can’t understand what they’re saying. This can force seniors into reducing how much they interact with their friends and family.
Isolation can cause a slew of health issues for elderly people, including an increased rate or mortality, the advancement of cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s, and depression, which has its own list of health problems, too. Once they’re isolated inside, it becomes difficult to hear a lot of practical goings-on in your living space, too.
Practical Aspects
Hearing loss can make it difficult to hear simple, practical things like someone knocking on the door, the door opening, the phone ringing, the television at a moderate volume, and a busy street. Most importantly, hearing loss can prevent you from hearing other people.
In all of these instances, someone’s life can be put in danger. Let’s say there’s an intruder that enters your home, and you need to notify authorities. Hearing loss could make it difficult for you to know that they’re even there until you see them.
Also, when you’re out and about on the town, hearing loss could put you in danger when you’re crossing the street, as you may not know a car is coming around the corner until the driver blares the horn. It may also increase the rate at which you fall because you’re not quite as aware of the sonics of your surroundings.
Economic Aspects
Hearing loss can make working incredibly difficult. Let’s say you have a job as a receptionist or telemarketer in your older years as a way to keep a steady income. Not being able to hear and understand the conversations you have on the phone can put you out of work.
The World Health Organization predicts that hearing loss’s economic impact is higher than $750 billion, between the amount of money that gets poured into treating it and the money lost by people with hearing loss not being able to work to their full potential.