HEARING IMPAIRMENT

What are Hearing Impairments and Deafness?

Hearing impairment is a hearing loss that prevents a person from totally receiving sounds. This could vary from mild to severe. When a hearing impairment is so severe that a child has little or no functional hearing and relies on visual communication the child is said to be medically deaf. The types of hearing losses include:

Conductive hearing losses: which are caused due to disease or obstruction in the outer or middle ear that prevents sound from moving efficiently.

Sensorineural hearing losses: which are caused due to damage to the sensory hair cells of the cochlea or inner ear or the nerves that supply it. This could happen due to diseases, injuries, or ototoxic drugs such as some antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Mixed hearing losses: which are a combination of damage to both the outer-middle ear systems and the inner ear, resulting in conductive hearing loss as well as sensorineural hearing loss.

 Central hearing losses: which are caused by damage to parts of the brain that interpret sound, due to injury, disease, or unknown causes.

Signs and Diagnosis

Hearing loss and deafness can be either acquired or congenital. If acquired, this would be after the birth; due to injury or illness such as ear infections, build up of fluid behind the ear drum or childhood diseases such as measles or chicken pox or due to head injury. If congenital, this condition would be present at birth, due to reasons such as family history, infections and complications during pregnancy such as maternal diabetes or toxicity. A child’s hearing loss or deafness could also be due to another disability such as Downs Syndrome.

Some signs to look outs for include a child not responding to sounds or to his or her own name, has delayed or unclear speech, and are not startled by loud noises. They could also always require a high volume on the tv or radio and often ask for things to be repeated.

Treatment

Hearing loss or deafness does not affect a child’s intellectual capacity or ability to learn, but it could affect a child’s educational performance. Early detection and treatment is important to help the child develop language and communication skills. Special education services required include speech, language, and auditory training from a specialist, amplification systems and services of an interpreter for those students who use sign language.

Conductive hearing losses can be helped by the use of hearing aids and can often be corrected medically or surgically unlike sensorineural hearing losses, which are often permanent.

Early access to language, signed and spoken is important and will help the child’s development specially when they start reading and writing at school. It will therefore be helpful to communicate with the child through facial expression, signing, speaking and gestures, to help the child learn to communicate and develop language as early as possible.

For most children with mild hearing loss, treatment can help them hear normally again. For some children who can’t hear or understand words even with the help of hearing aids, a tiny electronic device called a cochlear implant, which is surgically placed in the cochlea, would help turn sounds into electrical signals that stimulate the hearing nerve directly.

With the help of proper treatment including communication and language skills, children with hearing impairment and deafness can go on to further education and lead successful and fulfilling lives.

Source:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs300/en/