Senior Americans form one third of sufferers of chronic hearing loss. Amost twenty five to forty percent of those above 60 years of age are affected with hearing loss. Sensor neural conductive and central hearing loss are the types of hearing loss faced by people. There may also be a mixed or fourth type of hearing loss which is a combination of both the sensor neural and conductive hearing loss. Sensorineural hearing loss, the most common, affects roughly 90% of all hearing loss. This loss denotes either cochlear or lesion of the eighth nerve. Audiometry enables doctors to diagnose sensorineural hearing loss quickly and easily. This reveals a considerable hearing loss not followed by the “air-borne gap”, a quality of conductive hearing loss. This implies that air conduction is equal to bone conduction.

Other types of Hearing Loss

Conductive hearing loss is next in importance to hearing loss. It is the second most common after sensor neural hearing loss. Here sound is not transmitted into inner ear and diagnosis is possible only through observations of an “air borne gap” on audiometry, This shows that hearing is much better when sound is transmitted while bypassing the middle ear ossicular chain. Besides, the air borne gap should be a minimum of ten decibels in strength.

Central deafness is the third type of hearing loss, rare in comparison with conductive and sensor neural hearing loss. Recent studies show that central components are more seen more than previous anticipation. Patients, in general have poor scores in speech reception threshold or world recognition scores. Patients of this type of hearing loss usually experience inconsistent auditory behavior, resulting in wrong diagnosis as functional or phychogenic hearing disturbances.

Mixed hearing loss is the last type. Here conductive hearing loss combines with sensor neural hearing loss because of damage to the outer or middle ear and the inner ear or auditory nerve. Different types of hearing loss require treatment according to the different causes and severity of the condition. A few may be treated through medicine while others may need hearing aids as in the case of permanent hearing loss.

[tags]Diagnosing Hearing Loss, Chronic Hearing Loss, Conductive Hearing Loss[/tags]