Hearing loss is about pitch as much as volume. If it’s hard to understand the speech of a woman or a child, but you can still, mostly understand the men in the room, you might have some amount of high-frequency hearing loss. This is a very prevalent kind of hearing loss so you’re not alone.
high-frequency Hearing Loss Warning Signs
With high-frequency hearing loss, consonant sounds that allow conversations to be understood, get muddled even though you might still be able to register the volume of a woman or a child’s voice. Normally, consonant sounds like t, th, ch, soft c, s, sh, f, k, and h are the hardest to pick out. So, it might sound like a woman or child is mumbling, even though they aren’t. Understanding a child’s joke or your loved ones question about dinner plans becomes very difficult because you have lost the ability to distinguish these sounds. Isolation from friends and family, sadness, and frustration can be the result.
Other sounds within the high-frequency hearing loss range (2000 Hz) are lost to people with this condition. This includes high musical notes, birds chirping, and squeaks or whistles. Low-frequency sounds such as bass musical notes, the rumble of thunder or a man’s voice might still be relatively easy to detect, even if the volume isn’t very loud.
Reasons For High-Frequency Hearing Loss
As the most widespread type of loss of hearing, high-frequency hearing loss can creep up on people as they grow older, usually imperceptibly at first. high-frequency hearing loss can be triggered by other things besides aging like some medical issues like cardiovascular disease, too much noise exposure, and several medications.
These situations all harm to the little, hair-like sensory cells inside of the cochlea. It’s these tiny cells that receive sound input and send it to the brain for processing. The higher pitched sounds are commonly the first to be tough to understand because the high-frequency cells get damaged more easily than the lower pitched cells.
How to Prevent High-Frequency Hearing Loss
Although you can’t stop your ears from getting older, there are many steps you can take to stop or at least slow the advancement of high-frequency hearing loss. Some of these include:
- When eliminating earwax, never utilize a swab or any other small object. This can jam old ear wax into your ear canal and blunt your capacity 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.
- Ask your doctor about medications you use. At least 200 different types of medications will cause or worsen high-frequency hearing loss. Even aspirin at high doses can injure your hearing. To discover if there are choices less likely to injure your hearing, consult your doctor. Stay in close contact with your hearing health care provider if you can’t abstain from taking a particular medication. Additional hearing loss can be avoided by treatment.
- Taking good care of your general health. Smoking can injury your hearing. Poor health, poor nutrition, or lack of exercise can also hurt your hearing. Maintain your hearing by taking care of your general health.
- Wearing hearing protection in noisy settings.A definite indication that your ears might be getting damaged is if you have to shout to be heard in a noisy environment. Some examples of times when wearing ear-plugs are live music concerts, engines revving, running power tools, and a loud stereo. Noise-canceling earphones are also a good solution in certain situations, but might not fit in your pocket as easily as ear-plugs.
- Quieter things are more ideal. Pick the quietest product by checking the noise rating of the appliances. And don’t be reluctant to ask the restaurant manager to turn the music down if it’s hard to hear your dinner companions.
Treatment For High-Frequency Hearing Loss
Presently, the most effective strategy for dealing with high-frequency hearing loss is hearing aids. And there are various designs to choose from since this is the most prevalent type of hearing loss. So that they are crisper to the listener, hearing aids can increase high pitched sounds. You can immediately manage your level and degree of hearing loss by having your hearing care expert fine-tune your hearing aid to increase your ability to hear sounds at the right level. For circumstances such as talking on the phone, listening to children, having dinner at a restaurant, or business meetings many hearing aids can be manipulated by your phone and have directional microphones for fine-tuning.
Schedule a hearing test if you suspect you might have high-frequency hearing loss. If you want to better your capacity to hear your grandchild’s precious one-liner, odds are there are personally designed answers for you.