Significant Hearing Loss Can Be Prevented

By Shannon Hicks

One-third of adults age 65 and older have significant hearing loss. That percentage increases to 50 percent by the time people turn 75, and three-quarters of all adults age 85 and older have significant hearing loss.

Carol Maksimow opened a recent program on hearing, hearing loss, and related issues with those statistics, and spent the next hour offering suggestions on preventing such losses. A state-licensed hearing instrument specialist and the owner of a Hearing Aid Specialists of Connecticut, Ms Maksimow was in Newtown recently to present a free program. Newtown’s Visiting Nurse Association sponsored the presentation at St Rose Church’s Parish Hall.

About a dozen people attended the seminar, but it was an attentive group who arrived with interest and questions.

“The problem with hearing loss,” Ms Maksimow said, “is it happens slowly, over many years. Things that happen in our teens and 20s will affect us later in life. People don’t always realize that.”

The aging process will affect the nerves of the inner ear, she said. It is normal to lose some hearing capability as a person ages, but things can be done to prevent that loss from becoming severe.

In many cases, hearing loss is so gradual that people will not recognize or admit that they are losing their hearing until it is nearly debilitating. Loss of hearing can affect everything from relations at home, feelings about self, mental health, and self-confidence to relations with spouse, children, grandchildren and friends, social life, sense of safety, relations at work, and even a person’s sex life.

A May 1999 report from The National Council on the Aging offering the results of a major study said that untreated hearing loss “has serious emotional and social consequences for older persons.” The survey, one of the largest of its kind, involved 2,300 hearing impaired adults over the age of 50, and 2,090 close family members.

Hearing loss means something is not working between the outer ear and the brain.

“Your brain actually hears, but it’s your ears that bring sound from your ears to your brain,” Ms Maksimow pointed out.

Ms Maksimow suggests that adults have a baseline hearing test done when they turn 55. The appointment will run for approximately an hour, she said.

“You can see changes from that point, and keep track of everything, sooner rather than later,” she said.

An audioprosthologist will test for a number of things. Among the basic questions are Do people seem to mumble or speak in a softer voice than they used to? Do you feel tired or irritable after a long conversation? Do you sometimes miss key words in a sentence, or frequently need to ask people to repeat themselves? When you are in a group, or in a crowded restaurant, is it difficult for you to follow the conversation?

Prevention should start at an early age.

“Anything you did in your younger years will affect you in later life,” she said. Finding a few veterans in her audience, Ms Maksimow said she has met a number of veterans who have lost some hearing after serving in the armed forces during wartimes. The repeated firing of guns will stun, and damage, the hair cells of an inner ear.

Enough exposure to a loud noise will repeatedly stun the ear’s hair cells, which will eventually deteriorate and die off with enough mistreatment.

Loss of hearing leads to more than missing conversations.

“It’s important that your hearing is in balance. You want to hear background noise, one-on-one conversations, cooking, conversations at parties, everything,” Ms Maksimow. “You don’t want to start avoiding situations or gatherings because you fear you won’t hear everything.

“You want to want to go out to a restaurant, to have fun at family gatherings where there is a lot of chit-chat. But many times, with hearing loss comes isolation, which then leads to depression,” she said. The leading cause of depression in senior citizens, said Ms Maksimow, can be traced to undiagnosed hearing loss.

“People start looking at themselves and thinking ‘What’s wrong with me?’” she said. “They don’t want to go out, they don’t have any fun, the get lonely, and they become angry.”

Ms Maksimow also made time to talk about Tinnitus (the perception of noise in the ears when no external sound is present), different types of hearing loss — conductive, meaning a condition of the outer and/or middle ear; sensorineural, where the long-term exposure to sounds leads to damaged hair cells within the inner ear; and mixed, a combination of the aforementioned conditions — and hearing aids.

“Today’s hearing aids are degrees beyond what aids were like even a decade ago,” she said.

High-end digital hearing aids can make 52 million calculations per second, said Ms Maksimow. Digital instruments convert sounds into a digital signal, manipulating the incoming noise through its parameters. Analog instruments amplify all incoming sounds at the same rate.

Because a person’s hearing will continue to change, many of today’s hearing aids are adaptable.

“You don’t always have to have the most expensive instrument,” she cautioned. “You should take a few home and try them. For one thing, different instruments are designed for different focuses — different sounds, comfort, levels of sounds.

“You need to find something that you’re comfortable with and that works well with your body.” In her office alone, Ms Maksimow works with 13 different hearing aid manufacturers and can offer clients more than 150 models to choose from.

“Too many hearing aids end up in a drawer if the full fitting process isn’t properly followed,” she said. “Make time to sit with someone who will spend time with you. Ask questions. Tell them exactly what you’re looking for, what you want the instrument to accomplish, and then when you’re trying on the instrument for the first time tell them exactly what’s comfortable and what isn’t about it.”

Ms Maksimow said patients know almost immediately whether a new hearing aid is working for them or not.

“If there’s something not right, you know within 24 hours,” she said. She tells patients to plan to visit her office within three days of receiving their new hearing aids. They then visit on a monthly basis for up to a year for monitoring.

Ears should be treated with as much care and concern as any other part of the body. Some wear and tear is to be expected, but significant damage can be avoided. A construction worker using earplugs when he or she is running a jackhammer on a regular basis is good, but when someone starts putting cotton in their ears to lessen the pain of sensitivity of daily hearing is a bad thing.

Two attendees were overheard talking on their way out of the parish hall following the seminar.

“I’m not being a cranky old lady when I holler at kids in their cars,” one lady said to another. “But I hear the radios in these cars sometimes long before you even see the car and I just want to tell these kids ‘You’re not doing yourselves any favors. You’re going to need the music that loud in the future if you keep playing it that loud now.’

“They just don’t understand that they’re hurting their ears now,” she said, echoing the sentiments of Ms Maksimow.