Hearing Loss Help  

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A man explained:

I came across your blog post regarding LVAS and hearing loss, and was looking for assistance or more information.

I am a 48 year old with profound sensorineural hearing loss in both ears. I’ve worn aids for 10 years and had many medical and hearing specialist exams but no explanation of the cause. It keeps getting worse, but mysteriously seems to vary, becoming milder, or more severe, on a weekly basis. I’ve never been able to correlate it to any food or activity.

Recently, I took a vacation during which I paused my regular and typically strenuous aerobic and anaerobic exercise activities. That week, my hearing was much better. Upon return to my normal exhausting exercise, I’m having one of the worst hearing weeks ever. This clued me to the possible correlation between hearing loss and exercise. Your article is the only one I find tying the two together. Is there any treatment or test to verify if this is the cause?

The suggestion I fear is ‘give up exercise’. I play competitive tennis, and train extensively for it. It is a lifelong passion. Making that sacrifice would be a drastic step, but at least I’d like to understand if that could be an answer to a hearing problem that is now affecting my ability to earn a living and support my family.

This is not a well-known subject, so you may have to do your own experimenting. When you stopped exercising for a week and your hearing returned to whatever degree sounds like a positive correlation to me. In order to prove or disprove this theory, do the same thing again. Stop exercising for a week and see if the same thing happens. If so, you know that for you, at least, strenuous exercise negatively affects your hearing.

In order to find out why this is happening, I’d suggest you have an MRI or CT scan specifically looking to see whether you have Large [or Enlarged] Vestibular Aqueduct Syndrome (LVAS). Be sure to have them measure the vestibular aqueducts and give you the results in mm. Some doctors just eyeball them and say—yup, you got LVAS. That is not the way to do it.

As you read in the above-cited article, some people with LVAS lose hearing due to strenuous exercise. You may be one of these. If that is the case, don’t think you have to give up all exercise. What I’d suggest is give up strenuous exercise—where you really exert yourself—cut it down to moderate exercise for a week and see what happens to your ears. What you want to do is cut down the exertion in the exercise to below where it causes hearing loss. Once you find that point, then stay below it if you want to preserve your hearing.

Straining to run faster, lift more, etc. increases your internal body pressure, and this is what causes the problem if you have LVAS. Thus, exercise that doesn’t substantially increase your internal pressure should be OK.

Once you have tried the above and see what the results are, then you can decide whether you want to protect your ears (and to what level), or continue with competitive tennis (and at what level). Perhaps there is a happy medium that will meet both needs.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

“How do you drive if you can’t hear?” is a question I’ve been asked a number of times. And I normally answer, “I use my eyes when I drive. What do you use?” “Judy”, a hard of hearing lady, responding to this same question, quipped, “I use my hands. My ears aren’t able to reach the steering wheel.”

Indeed, when my wife (before I met her) first noticed she was losing her hearing, one of her first worries was, “Will I still be able to drive?” Apparently, many people think you need to be able to hear in order to drive. I think a better criterion is being able to see!…

The above is the introduction to my article “Driving Safely with Hearing Loss” that was published in the Spring 2009 edition of Hearing Health magazine. Read the rest of this article, which is packed with practical information on driving safely even though you can’t hear honking horns, sirens or your car’s warning alerts.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

“When “Jonathan” took a course of Erythromycin prescribed by his doctor, the last thing on his mind was that this drug would cause him to lose hearing in one ear, give him hyperacusis and balance problems, and result in “horrific bilateral tinnitus.”

No one warned “Eunice” that taking the anti-depressant drug Amitriptyline would result in “screaming tinnitus”, a condition much worse than her original depression.

Without warning, drugs that were prescribed for Jonathan and Eunice to treat other health issues resulted in loud, intrusive tinnitus, making their lives almost unbearable. (These stories are true, although I’ve changed their names.)

Ototoxic (OH-toe-TOKS-ik) drugs are those medications that can cause ototoxic (ear damaging) side effects to your ears. Such drugs can cause hearing loss, hyperacusis (normal sounds now too loud), tinnitus and other phantom sounds, and a whole host of balance problems. This does not happen to everyone who takes drugs by any means, but it does happen to a significant number of unfortunate people.

Note this well. Even though a drug’s description lists tinnitus as a side effect, it does not mean that you will develop tinnitus if you take it. Some people do. Many don’t. The problem is that you don’t know into which class you will fall. Therefore, you should learn about the side effects of any drug before you begin taking it. Be particularly cautious until you know that any given drug won’t adversely affect your ears….”

This is the beginning of my article on drugs and tinnitus that the American Tinnitus Association published in their April 2009 edition of Tinnitus Today. Read the the rest of this article here.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Hearing loss is typically misunderstood by the general population. Thus, it is not surprising that many hearing people have bought into the following 7 myths regarding hearing loss and the people with these losses.

Myth No. 1. Hard of hearing people are less intelligent than “hearing” people. Thus, they attach this social stigma to having a hearing loss. This myth is so deeply ingrained in the general population that even today most hard of hearing people refuse to wear hearing aids for fear of being thought stupid. The truth is, hard of hearing people are just like other people. Some are smart and some are not. Don’t blame any perceived lack of intelligence on hearing loss. Place the blame where it should be—on communication difficulties.

Myth No. 2. Wearing hearing aids returns hearing to normal. Not true. Hearing aids can improve hearing—typically reducing the hearing loss by half—but never bring it up to normal. Thus hard of hearing people still have a hearing loss even when wearing their hearing aids. They often need to supplement what they hear by using assistive devices, by speechreading and by using other effective hearing loss coping strategies.

Myth No. 3. Hard of hearing people have selective hearing. They only hear what they want to hear, but they can hear if they really want to. While it is true that hard of hearing people do indeed have selective hearing, it is not because they don’t pay attention. Rather, it is because their ears do not hear certain frequencies of sounds. They have no choice over which sounds they hear and don’t hear.

Myth No. 4. Only old people have a hearing loss. Not true. Because of excessive noise exposure, taking medications that damage ears, ear infections and other factors, hearing loss affects children, adults and seniors alike. One study showed that on any given day, 15% of the children in elementary schools have a significant hearing loss.

Myth No. 5. When you have a hearing loss you somehow (magically) become a good lip reader. Thus, since hard of hearing people can read lips, it doesn’t matter whether they hear or not. Fact: lip reading, (now more correctly called speechreading) while invaluable, is far from perfect. Only about 30% of English sounds can be easily read on a person’s lips. That leaves the hard of hearing person guessing at the remaining 70%. While a few are remarkably good at this, no one is perfect.

Myth No. 6. If a hard of hearing person can’t hear you, raise your voice at them. The truth is, most hard of hearing people need you to speak up just a bit, but they really want you to face them, then speak slowly and enunciate clearly. This is because when you lose some of your hearing, you hear people talking, but often you can’t understand much of what they are saying.

Myth No. 7. Hard of hearing people understand sign language. Therefore, in order to accommodate people with hearing loss at meetings, you just need to provide a sign language interpreter. Fact: of the 70 million people with hearing loss, fewer than 1% know how to sign. Hard of hearing people typically need to use, in addition to their hearing aids, various assistive devices and real-time captioning (CART).

And one bonus myth—Myth No. 8. If you speak normally, you obviously can’t have much of a hearing loss, therefore you are really faking it when you speak properly but say you can’t hear. The truth is, the vast majority of hard of hearing people speak normally. Some people that have more severe hearing losses and don’t wear hearing aids talk louder than normal. Other people with profound hearing losses speak in a flat tone (deaf speech). And surprise, some people with severe to profound hearing losses speak perfectly normally too. I’m one of them!