"Unknown Causes" of Hearing Loss

Nancy

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There are many people who knew the cause of their own hearing loss (aging, loud noise exposure, an illness, accident, etc.)....but there are many others who don't know what the cause of their hearing loss. I know one lady who became severely HOH and she doesn't know how she lost her hearing (she doesn't belong to any of the forums I belong to, but she's on my email list). She's been this way for years and she's in her 40s.

Is there a way these people can find out the reasons? Why are people out there not knowing what had caused the deafness? :dunno:

On a personal note, when I was 14 years old, I lost some more hearing in my left ear....I could no longer wear an aid in this ear (with a HA, it sounded more like severe static on the radio -- very garbled words and the sounds are not clear). My right ear is still stable since age 2 and i wear a powerful BTE. I wonder now if I have "progressive" loss because of the meningitis since my left ear used to be aidable until 14 years old?? But I don't really know why my hearing dropped! :dunno:
 
Finding known causes for hearing loss is one thing and for some people, they'll most likely never know unless modern advances are made to help pinpoint the causes...although, finding ways to help alleviate a certain amount of hearing loss for those who desires to be able to continuously hear something is almost as equally as important than knowing what the causes are for the hearing loss. For some people not wanting to know or to seek the causes for losing their hearing is pretty much self-explanatory, meaning, they simply do not want to know or care less what or how it happened...?

One obvious reason why some hearing drops is when some people do get older, they happen to lose their senses (not their 'marbles', mind ya! ;) ) As for you, have you considered checking into it and possibly see why it is that your hearing seem to be going down? Psstt...hopefully you haven't been standing nearby huge speakers in a band/concert, etc.! :lol: (--just jokin' with ya! ;) )
 
I don't understand WHY people would want to find out why it happened. Hearing loss is not that big of a deal....
 
deafdyke said:
I don't understand WHY people would want to find out why it happened. Hearing loss is not that big of a deal....

To some, losing their hearing has a devastating effect. Its probably easier for those who were born deaf or lost their hearing early, but for older folks who lost their hearing, it is a serious life change.

Those that are deaf probably wouldn't compare blindness to deafness, but for someone who has been able to hear their whole life and then to lose it, it would be just as devastating as going blind.

I can think of at least one past member whose deafness had a profound negative impact.
 
but for older folks who lost their hearing, it is a serious life change.

I can think of at least one past member whose deafness had a profound negative impact
True, but I mean..knowing why it happened wouldn't change anything would it? And I mean I know it's devastating for older folks, but still....
are you talking about Ravensteve?
 
Some people just like to have an explanation...even for those things that cannot be explained. For those that lose hearing later in life, I believe, are under the impression it is some sort of illness. When you have an 'illness' you want to educate yourself about it. It is also possibly the thought of holding out hope that a 'cure' will be found.

There is a police officer I work with who wears hearing aids. Unfortunately, his hearing is continuing to fail and he will be retiring early. He's at retirement age and has enough time under his belt to get his full pension, but he wasn't ready to retire just yet. He held out hope for a long time that either his hearing loss would be cured or it would not get any worse than it was. To him, it was an illness.
 
Some of us want to understand what happened so we can help others. I lost most of my hearing befeore I was three; it had something to do with an illness, but nobody knows exactly what happened. Now I'm nineteen and studying electrical engineering, trying to come up with inventions that might make the lives of people with hearing loss easier - and I reckon I can do more good if I know what causes make them harder in the first place. Also, whenever someone founds out that I have a hearing loss, the question of "So how did you lose your hearing?" inevitably comes up, and I'd like to be able to answer that with more than a "Nobody really knows."

It's kind of like if your car breaks down. Sure, no big deal, I can bike (with traffic where I live, it's actually faster). But you're sitting there with a car in your garage with something busted, and you don't know what - and you see a couple of your neighbors looking at their broken cars and scratching their heads, trying to figure out whether they should fix it or learn to bike. Wouldn't it make it easier to help them if you learned about how cars broke down?

Not that losing your hearing makes you "broken" or is a "problem to be fixed," but it's something that's good to understand.
 
Hearing Loss

A boy in my church was "borm deaf" (at least that is what the doctors say). He had fluids in his ear when he was 10 months old, but it was not from an illness. His mother says that he would cry from an earache and when she took him in the doctors just said that there was fluid in his ears. They would to wait another 6 months before they found out his was deaf. His mother also said that she knew something was wrong when he would not respond to his name as a baby. May be there are some unknown reasons about hearing loss :dunno:
 
Mine is to much iron like throwing a hand full of iron shavings in to an electric motor shorts everything out not just my ears and heart and ...oh well not so bad but I'm old enough I've heard it all before, in my 50's had a gene turn on just to p!$$ Me off took years to figure it out, staying alive was the hard part, deafness and not being able to understand or eat my new normal, so be your own normal
 
I don't understand WHY people would want to find out why it happened. Hearing loss is not that big of a deal....
Any scale of hearing loss is a big deal, and sometimes (not all) hoh people feel like they have their feet in two worlds, the hearing one, and the deaf one.
 
Hearing Loss

A boy in my church was "borm deaf" (at least that is what the doctors say). He had fluids in his ear when he was 10 months old, but it was not from an illness. His mother says that he would cry from an earache and when she took him in the doctors just said that there was fluid in his ears. They would to wait another 6 months before they found out his was deaf. His mother also said that she knew something was wrong when he would not respond to his name as a baby. May be there are some unknown reasons about hearing loss :dunno:
I wonder if one of his cochlea hairs were damaged...
 
I am so glad you brought this up! I and my other 3 brothers were all born deaf, nerve deafness is what we have.
They don't know why.
Mydad has a hearing daughter from his first marriage and my mom has a hearing from her first marriage.
But when my mom and dad are together they get us all deaf children.
I often wondered why.
sometimes genetics suck
 
I lost my hearing due to genetics plus an overactive immune system which caused another illness. It wasn't sudden but happened in the course of a few years. I've been on medications (antibiotics and others and treatments to treat the disease, some of which also damaged hearing,. Now I'm getting older which also doesn't help.
 
Same, my story all over here, again slide started late 20s, high frequency loss, then concenents blends, more concenents gone, don't know when bad geen turned on but around 55 finely discovered when it almost killed me do to massive organ failures, years worth of antibiotics and other meads, been trying to think when and why my tinnitus started sense reading this thread, I'm thinking about 8-10 I got hit in the head with a baseball , that may have been the start, but had many child hood disease treated with massive meds and other traumas it's a mairical I'm steal alive;)
 
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