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Symptoms of hearing damage

Symptoms of Hearing Damage

Symptoms of hearing loss include:

• Muffled hearing
• Difficulty understanding what people are saying, especially when there are competing voices or background noise. You may be able to hear someone speaking, but you cannot distinguish the specific words
• Listening to the television or radio at higher volume than in the past
• Avoiding conversation and social interaction. Social situations can be tiring and stressful if you do not hear well. You may begin to avoid those situations as hearing becomes more difficult.
• Depression. Many adults may be depressed because of how hearing loss is affecting their social life.

Other symptoms that may occur with hearing loss include:

• Ringing, roaring, hissing, or buzzing in the ear (tinnitus).
• Ear pain, itching, or irritation.
• Pus or fluid leaking from the ear. This may result from an injury or infection that is causing hearing loss.
• Vertigo, which can occur with hearing loss caused by Ménière's disease, acoustic neuroma, or labyrinthitis.

The type of hearing loss you have often determines how well you hear in certain situations:

• If something is blocking sound from moving to the inner ear (conductive hearing loss), then the loss will be the same for low and high tones. As long as people speak loudly enough, you will still be able to tell the difference between similar sounding words (such as "thigh" and "high") and be able to hear with a noisy background. Examples of conductive hearing loss include earwax or a growth blocking sound, such as occurs in otosclerosis.
• If the inner ear is not working correctly (sensorineural hearing loss), then high tones (such as women's or children's voices) will be more difficult to hear than low sounds. It will probably be difficult to hear when there is background noise. Examples of sensorineural hearing loss include age-related and noise-induced hearing loss.

People who have hearing loss are sometimes not aware of it, especially when the loss has developed gradually, as is often the case in noise-induced and age-related hearing loss. Family members or friends are often the first to notice the hearing loss.

One reason people fail to notice the danger of noise is that too much exposure to noise causes few symptoms. Hearing loss is rarely painful. The symptoms are usually vague feelings of pressure or fullness in the ears, speech that seems to be muffled or far away, and a ringing sound in the ears that you notice when you are in quiet places. These symptoms may go away minutes, hours or days after the exposure to noise ends.

People assume that if the symptoms go away, their ears have "bounced back" to normal. This is not really true. Even if there are no more symptoms, some of the cells in the inner ear may have been destroyed by the noise. Your hearing returns to normal if enough healthy cells are left in your inner ear. But you will develop a lasting hearing loss if the noise exposure is repeated and more cells are destroyed.

The first sign of a noise-induced hearing loss is not hearing high-pitched sounds, like the singing of birds, or not understanding speech when in a crowd or an area with a lot of background noise. If the damage goes on, hearing declines further, and lower-pitched sounds become hard to understand.

What happens next?

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Directors - Philip Jackson and Christopher Ward

The Directors of Imperium Law Solicitors Limited are all Solicitors of England and Wales.

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