Hearing Disability

A hearing disability is a reduction in one’s ability to hear. Hearing disability affects the life of each individual of all ages and can occur at any time from the childhood up to old age. Some treatments permanently treat hearing disability and some treat temporarily. Sometimes, this disability is mild or moderate but the individuals are not aware about the disability and some are affected with severe hearing disability. Hearing disability depends upon the frequencies and affects the individual ears.

Causes of Hearing Disability

There are number of causes of hearing disability and they are:-

Genetic Factors

Genetic factors can also be one of the causes of hearing disability. The recessive and dominant genes can cause mild and deep hearing disability. Some of the causes of genetic factors are congenital hearing disability such as DFNB, recessive syndromic hearing disability is Pendred syndrome and dominant syndromic hearing disability is stickler syndrome.

Medication

Hearing disability can be caused due to some medications such as aspirin, diuretics and macrolide which affect the hearing and can cause irreversible damage to the ears.

Long Term Exposure to Environmental Noise

The people who live near the freeways or airports are more often exposed to hearing problems. Exposure to loud level of noises for long period can cause a permanent hearing disability.

There are various other causes of hearing disability such as physical trauma and diseaseprocesses affecting the ear.

Types of Hearing Disability

There are three types of hearing disability such as:-

• Conductive – This hearing disability is caused by the abnormal functioning of the outer or middle ear system such as ear drum, stapes bones, external ear canal etc.
• Sensorineural – This is caused by damage of the auditory brainstem and inner ear such as cochlea.
• Combination of sensorineural and conductive – This hearing disability is caused by the combination of both types of hearing disability.

In children, hearing disability affects their social isolation in various ways such as delayed social development which in turn delayed language acquisition. Some people also loose their hearing in adulthood or adolescence and suffers a lot of problem. They can use various hearing aids or cochlear implant and can learn sign language and develop speech reading skills.

Treatments of Hearing Disability

• Adaptations to Hearing Impairment – In this type of treatment, the disabled people can use various assistive devices such as they can communicate with one another by using telecommunications devices for the deaf. This device is like a word processor that transmits the text on the telephone. Other devices include a doorbell, ringing telephone and a fire alarm.

• Gene Therapy – Number of developments and research has been done in the regrowth of cochlea cells which can be made available to the disabled people with hearing problems.