Hearing Health Q&A

Q: Is All Hearing Loss the Same?

A: Good question! Hearing loss is different for every person, and not just their degree of hearing loss. Hearing is a complex process, and a problem anywhere in that process can result in hearing loss.

 

How Hearing Works

Hearing is more than just sound entering your ears — your nerves and brain work closely with your ears to make it happen.

 

The ear

Your outer ear funnels and gathers sound waves, then sends them down your ear canal to your eardrum, which starts to vibrate. Three tiny bones in your middle ear pick up the vibrations, amplify them, and transfer them to your inner ear.

The vibrations become waves in the fluid of your inner ear. These waves set in motion tiny hairlike cells, which create nerve impulses.

 

The auditory nerve

Your auditory (hearing) nerve carries all those impulses from your inner ear to the brain region that processes sound.

 

The brain

Your brain does a lot of behind-the-scenes work making sense of sound information. It pinpoints where the sound is coming from, focuses on it, separates out background noise, determines whether it recognizes the sound, and identifies whether it’s speech, music, etc.

 

The Four Types of Hearing Loss

Your type of hearing loss depends on where the problem is along the hearing pathway described in the previous section.

 

Conductive hearing loss

In conductive hearing loss, something is keeping sound waves from reaching your inner ear. Many things can cause this, such as earwax or debris in your ear canal, an eardrum injury, fluid or infection in your middle ear, or even a middle-ear bone abnormality. Conductive hearing loss is often treatable with medicine or surgery.

 

Sensorineural hearing loss

Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common type — damage has occurred in your inner ear or somewhere along your auditory nerve. Often, the damage is to the tiny hairlike cells in your inner ear.

Common causes are aging, exposure to loud noise, injury, or disease. Sensorineural hearing loss can be managed with hearing aids.

 

Mixed hearing loss

In mixed hearing loss, sensorineural hearing loss happens in combination with conductive hearing loss. It can be temporary or permanent, depending on the cause.

 

Auditory neuropathy

In auditory neuropathy, your inner ear processes sound well, but by the time it reaches your brain, it isn’t organized in a way that’s easily understood. If you have auditory neuropathy, you have trouble with speech perception or clearly understanding speech.

 

High-Frequency Hearing Loss

If you have hearing aids — or you’ve been researching a possible hearing loss — you’ve probably come across the term high-frequency hearing loss. This isn’t a type. It describes which sounds you have trouble hearing.

High frequencies correspond to things like beeping, birdsongs, autumn leaves crunching underfoot, and the voices of women and children. They’re also known as high-pitched sounds. The hairlike cells in your inner ear that are responsible for high-pitched sounds are often the first to be damaged, which is why high-frequency hearing loss is so common.

And that’s just scratching the surface! Hearing loss can be a symptom of many different conditions; it can have many causes and even differing degrees of severity.

If you think you may have a hearing loss, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. And excellent place to start is with an evaluation provided by a hearing care team you trust. Contact us today to get started!