by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
The Washington Post (June 26, 2008) ran a piece entitled “Sudden Hearing Loss May Portend Stroke” The first three paragraphs read:
Sudden hearing loss may foreshadow a stroke by as much as two years,” say Taiwanese researchers.
The researchers analyzed five years of follow-up data on 1,423 patients hospitalized for an acute episode of sudden hearing loss and found they were more than 1.5 times more likely to suffer a stroke than a control group of 5,692 patients hospitalized for an appendectomy.
The findings, published in the current issue of Stroke, haven’t been duplicated in other research and should be interpreted with caution.
The article then goes on to muddy the waters and reaches no clear conclusions.
What the researchers don’t seem to realize is that this can make sense. if a person has a build-up of “gunk” in their arteries (to use a fancy medical term), and if that gunk should travel to one of the arteries in (or leading to) the inner ear and block blood flow there, the result is sudden and drastic hearing loss.
If the same gunk had traveled to the brain and blocked an artery there, the result would have been a stroke. Same condition—just a different location.
Now, since the arteries in the inner ear are among the smallest in the body, it doesn’t take much to block them. Thus such episodes of sudden hearing loss truly may indicate an underlying problem that, if not fixed, may lead to strokes and heart attacks if bigger pieces of gunk lodge in the brain or heart respectively. Thus it behooves us to heed warnings such as sudden hearing loss of vascular origin.
Having said that, there are lots of causes of sudden hearing loss that have nothing at all to do with vascular issue. Thus, don’t think if you get sudden hearing loss, you will get a stroke later—but it might be a precursor if you already have vascular issues.
Dear Dr.
I experienced sudden hearing loss in my right ear on June 18th, 2011. I don’t know if you’ll get this message but I will write my story here hopefully with a response from you.
I was at a friend’s home having dinner…we ate vegetarian stuff but also had beer and followed with coffee. My mistake was to get up right after eating and began playing 2 on 2 basketball.
Bad idea. I really strained myself with a full stomach. Up until that point, I have been exercising regularly, eat healthy (at least that’s what I thought), and watching my weight. Prior to the incident, I was having a “healthy” cottage cheese, fruit bowl breakfast with a cup of coffee for months before….just about everyday.
On that day, when I came back and sat down after the game, I was really strained physically. About 5 minutes after sitting down, I rapidly lost my hearing and developed tinnitus. The following morning (a Sunday), I began having vertigo.
I saw the ENT on Monday (2 days afterwards) where he promptly put me on Valtrex and 10 days of Prednisone.
I took the Prednisone for 10 days but was going crazy. It really affected me. I had to stop…even though he wanted to continue giving me the drug in lower doses (10 MG instead of 60, 40, 20).
During my first hearing test, I had lost hearing down to about 70 DB after 2000HZ. I was very depressed.
I went to 4 different ENT’s none of which had any answers to help at all.
I began to exercise mildly again and avoided all caffeine and dairy until now (10/10/2011). I also had an MRI to rule out tumors…which thank goodness came back negative.
Then I had another hearing test about 2 months after my initial incident. My hearing had improved quite a bit….where now the drop in hearing occured a little above 4000H and went down to 45db at around 6000HZ and on to 8000HZ….a marked improvement.
Since that test until now, I have become more conscious about self-testing and trying to notice improvements. For example, when I walk with my wife at night, I try to hear crickets because at first I couldn’t. Now I barely…BARELY hear them and only as a high pitched chirp.
I am hoping my exercise regiment, eating healthy, taking lipoflavanoids, etc keeps my ear improving. Most say that it will take 6 -12 months to really see an improvement if at all.
My tinnitus is really bothersome and sometimes my ear feels like there is something crawling on it and pressure variations occur with a sensation of the ea plugging up and then opening up.
I’m not sure if that is a sign of improvement or nothing at all…but something is happening that is for sure.
What worries me is that I feel that in my case, being that this happened during a stressful, strenuous event, it may have been a stroke of somekind. I am very concerned that not a single doctor ever considered this to be the case….shocked actually given their claim that they are experts.
One thing I did notice about myself prior to the incident was that I was under extreme stress emotionally and physically in my life at that time. The right side of my body was as tight as a drum muscle-wise…knots everywhere in my SEM muscles, front shoulder, behind the ear, etc…lot’s of blood flow restriction!
My friend (who is also a kidney doctor) suggested that it may have been a vascular issue…and I think he is right.
I also suffer from TMJ. I don’t know what happened that fateful day…the stress in my life, my body being very stressed out, eating and then exercising, the basketball mildly bouncing off my head, etc…all these contributed to something I could never have dreamed of happening to me.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thank you.