Hearing loss is about pitch as much as about volume. It’s possible you have some degree of high-frequency hearing loss if you can comprehend what the men in the room are saying but you can’t hear children and women. This is a very prevalent form of hearing loss so you’re not alone.
Symptoms of High-Frequency Hearing Loss
With high-frequency hearing loss, you might still be able to pick up the volume of a woman’s voice or a child’s voice, but consonant sounds that make conversations easy to understand, get muddled. Normally the hardest to pick up are consonant sounds like ch, th, t, soft s, c, sh, k, f, and h. So, it may sound like a woman or child is mumbling, even though they actually aren’t. Losing the ability to differentiate these sounds makes it very difficult to understand a child’s joke or your sister’s question about dinner plans. Isolation from family and friends, sadness, and frustration can be the result.
Other sounds within the high-frequency hearing loss range (2000 Hz) are lost to people who have this condition. This includes high musical notes, birds chirping, and squeaks or whistles. Even at low volumes a man’s voice, thunder, and bass musical notes, might be fairly easy to detect.
Reasons For High-Frequency Hearing Loss
Frequently imperceptible at first, high-frequency hearing loss, the most common type of hearing loss, can creep up on you as you get older. In addition to aging, too much noise exposure, certain medications and numerous medical problems like cardiovascular disease can result in high-frequency hearing loss.
These scenarios all cause damage to the tiny, hair-like sensory cells within the cochlea. It’s these tiny cells that pick up sound input and send it to the brain for processing. The higher pitched sounds are frequently the first to become tough to understand because the high-frequency cells become injured more easily than the lower pitched cells.
high-frequency Hearing Loss, How to Prevent it
Although you can’t prevent your ears from aging, there are several steps you can take to stop or at least slow the progress of high-frequency hearing loss. Including these:
- Quieter things are better. Find noise ratings on appliances and choose the quietest products. If it’s hard to hear your friends at dinner, don’t be hesitant to ask the manager to turn down the music.
- If you use any medication, ask your doctor if it has any impact on hearing. high-frequency hearing loss can be triggered by at least 200 different kinds of medications. Even too much aspirin can injure your hearing. To learn if there are choices less likely to injure your hearing, consult your doctor. Stay in close touch with your hearing health care provider if you can’t abstain from using a particular medication. Additional hearing loss can be avoided by treatment.
- Your health is important so take care of it. Your hearing can be damaged by smoking. Your hearing can also be harmed from poor health caused by poor nutrition. Protect your hearing by taking care of your overall health.
- Using hearing protection in noisy situations.A definite indication that your ears could be getting injured is if you have to shout to be heard in a loud environment. Heavy traffic, engines revving, power tools running, the loud sound systems at movie theaters or rock concerts are all examples of instances when putting in the ear-plugs is a smart idea. Noise-canceling headphones are also a good alternative in certain scenarios, but might not fit in your pocket as easily as ear-plugs.
- When getting rid of earwax, never use a swab or any other small object. This can push old ear wax into your ear canal and dull your ability to hear. Gently wipe out excess earwax with a cloth when you’re done showering, or ask your hearing care specialist about different ear irrigation techniques for getting rid of earwax without hurting your hearing.
high-frequency Hearing Loss Treatment
Presently, the most reliable strategy for managing high-frequency hearing loss is hearing aids. And since this is the most common kind of hearing loss, there are numerous different designs a person can choose from. Hearing aids can boost high-pitched sounds so they are clearer to the listener. Several models can be configured and your hearing care expert can help fine-tune them to increase your ability to hear those sounds at the right level, directly addressing the level and degree of the hearing loss. For circumstances like talking on the phone, listening to children, having dinner at a restaurant, or business meetings many hearing aids can be controlled by your phone and have directional microphones for fine-tuning.
Schedule a hearing test if you think you might have high-frequency hearing loss. If you want to better your capacity to hear your grandchild’s precious one-liner, chances are there are individually tailored answers for you.