What social consequences of hearing loss?

The hearing loss or sensorineural perception is a deficit or difficulty hearing sounds and / or understand words. It translates into difficulty in verbal communication as interference in the development of social and labor relations.

Hearing loss in general and bilateral particular, it makes patients tend to isolation by the difficulty of verbal communication. In addition, some causes of hearing loss in both transmission and perception, can cause other conditions to be his general tumor or disease that affects the whole organism cause.

Types of hearing loss

The hearing loss may be sound transmission by the middle ear, perception of sound by the inner ear and hearing nerve or processing by the central nervous system.

Causes of hearing loss

The factors that cause hearing loss depends on the type that is:

• Conductive hearing loss: infection, otitis, trauma, tumors of the middle ear or even a simple earwax in the ear canal.
• Perception hearing loss: all problems affecting the inner ear (snail) and ear nerve. The most common are vascular accidents, increased pressure in the inner ear (endolymphatic hydrops) and tumors of the auditory nerve. Although the characteristics of the loss of the inner ear are different from the auditory nerve, they can be considered similar.

Symptoms of hearing loss

Hearing loss occurs with hearing loss and unilateral or bilateral hearing.

• Unilateral hearing difficulties manifested by the difficulty of being able to localize sound in space. The patient does not know where sounds come from, have difficulty understanding speech when there is background noise or speak several people at once, and has poor hearing when the sound reaches the diseased side.
• In bilateral hearing impaired, regardless of the above symptoms, these patients have difficulty hearing any sound or understand words in any environment.

Treatment of hearing loss

Hearing loss can be treated by means of sound amplification in some cases (hearing aids) and surgically in others, like tympanoplasties, stapedectomies, middle ear implants and / or inner ear etc.