Let’s talk about hearing loss. What types of hearing loss are there? What does it mean you have a conductive hearing loss or a sensorineural hearing loss? What are the levels of hearing loss, from mild to moderate to profound? Listen to this week’s episode to learn all about hearing loss.

Transcript:

Welcome back to the All About Audiology, a podcast that’s well, all about audiology. I’m your host Dr. Lilach Saperstein, an audiologist so passionate about this field.  In our last full episode we spoke about how hearing works, all the complex and fascinating structures and how they all work together- we spoke about so much and yet we only just scratched the surface of how the different parts of our auditory system work together so that we can hear.

Today, we’re going to talk ALL ABOUT HEARING LOSS. What happens when some parts of that system aren’t working in the typical way, or if pieces are missing and so on.

We’ll be diving into the different kinds of hearing loss, what’s meant by different levels of hearing loss, AND, we’ll also touch on many different causes of hearing loss.

Just before we begin, I want to remind you that I’m interested in hearing your comments, answering any questions you have and that the All About You episodes, every other episode, are all about you and your experience with audiology, so please feel free to contact me on the website, allaboutaudiology.com, or send me a direct message on instagram- @allaboutaudiologypodcast, and of course we have our Facebook group, Allaboutaudiology!

So let’s dive in to today’s topic:

There are two major categories or types of hearing loss, well actually three. There’s conductive hearing loss, sensorineural hearing loss, and there’s mixed hearing loss which is when a person has components of both conductive and sensorineural. So two, but really three if a person has a combination of the first two. To review from last week, we have an outer ear, middle ear, and inner ear.

When there’s a problem with the outer or middle ear, this can lead to a conductive hearing loss, because sounds are not being conducted properly into the inner ear where the cochlea is. So some causes of this kind of hearing loss, of conductive hearing loss, will have to do with anything that’s blocking sounds from getting into the ear canal, like impacted wax, or any kind of issue with the the ear canal itself, like swimmer’s/surfer’s ear, where bony growths can form along the ear canal and eventually block the ear canal.

Causes can be congenital, from birth, like atresia, microtia, or anotia, that these are different malformations of the ear and ear canal. Anotia is having no outer ear, microtia, is when the outer ear is very small, and atresia of the ear canal is a narrowing of the ear canal and there can be stenosis of the ear canal, where the skin is actually blocking. These are different outer ear causes of conductive hearing loss.

There can also be middle ear causes, and here again these can also be present from birth, like malformations of the ossicles, or missing ossicles, or a problem with the bones in the body overall- these could all contribute to a conductive hearing loss and sounds are not being conducted in. There are also acquired issues that can happen throughout the lifespan, things like fluid accumulation in the middle ear space,