Hearing loss is about pitch as much as about volume. It’s conceivable you have some amount of high-frequency hearing loss if you can understand what the men in the room are saying but you can’t hear children and women. You’re not alone…this is the most prevalent type of hearing loss.
Warning Signs of High-Frequency Hearing Loss
With high-frequency hearing loss, you may still be able to register the volume of a woman’s voice or a child’s voice, but consonant sounds that make conversations easy to understand, get muddled. Normally, consonant sounds like t, th, ch, soft c, s, sh, f, k, and h are the most difficult to differentiate. Even though a woman or a child is not mumbling, it might sound that way. Losing the ability to distinguish 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 with this problem. This includes birds chirping, high musical notes, whistles or squeaks. Low-frequency sounds such as bass musical notes, the rumble of thunder or a man’s voice may still be quite easy to discern, even if the volume isn’t that loud.
Reasons For High-Frequency Hearing Loss
As the most common type of hearing loss, high-frequency hearing loss can creep up on people as they grow older, usually imperceptibly in the beginning. high-frequency hearing loss can be caused by other things in addition to aging such as specific medical problems like cardiovascular disease, too much noise exposure, and several medications.
The little hair-like sensors within the cochlea are damaged by all of these situations. Sound input is picked up by these little cells and sent to the brain for processing. The higher pitched sounds are commonly the first to become hard to understand because the high-frequency cells get injured more easily than the lower pitched cells.
How to Prevent High-Frequency Hearing Loss
You can take several steps to slow down or stop the development of high-frequency hearing loss even though you can’t stop your ears from getting older. Some of these include:
- If you take any medication, ask your doctor if it has any effect on hearing. high-frequency hearing loss can be triggered by at least 200 different kinds of medications. Your hearing can even be harmed by too much aspirin. Check with your doctor to see if there are possibilities less likely to harm your hearing. If you can’t avoid using a particular medication, stay in close communication with your hearing care specialist for regular hearing loss and balance testing. Additional hearing loss can be avoided by treatment.
- Your health is important so take good care of it. Smoking can injury your hearing. Poor health, poor nutrition, or not enough exercise can also harm your hearing. Maintain your hearing by taking care of your overall health.
- medication hearing protection in noisy settings. If you need to shout to be heard in a loud environment, this is a sure signal the noise might hurt your hearing. Some instances of occasions when using ear protection are live music concerts, engines revving, running power tools, and a loud music system. Noise-canceling earphones are also a good option in some circumstances, but might not fit inside your pocket as easily as ear-plugs.
- 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.
- Never utilizing a swab (or other small objects) to remove ear wax. This can push old ear wax into your ear canal and dull your ability to hear. A hot shower is normally enough o drain exes earwax but if this doesn’t work ask your hearing care professional for other methods of irrigating your ears.
Treatment For High-Frequency Hearing Loss
Hearing aids are currently the most effective strategy for treating high-frequency hearing loss. And since this is the most common kind of hearing loss, there are many different designs a person can choose from. So that they are crisper to the user, hearing aids can augment high pitched sounds. You can immediately address your level and degree of hearing loss by having your hearing care expert fine-tune your hearing aid to enhance your ability to hear sounds at the correct level. For circumstances such as talking on the phone, listening to children, having dinner at a restaurant, or business meetings several hearing aids can be controlled by your phone and have directional microphones for fine-tuning.
If you suspect that you may have high-frequency hearing loss, schedule a hearing exam. If you want to increase your ability to hear your grandchild’s priceless one-liner, odds are there are individually tailored answers for you.