Causes and Diagnoses

Causes and Diagnoses of Hearing Loss

While advanced age is the most common reason for hearing loss, there are many other causes of impaired hearing, including:

• Excessive noise (long-term exposure or sudden, extremely loud noise)
• Ruptured ear drum
• Certain drugs, including gentamicin and some chemotherapy drugs
• Viral or bacterial infections accompanied by high fever
• Chronic fluid in the middle ear
• Head injury
• Tumors of the head
• Abnormal bone growth
• Stroke
• Heredity
• Meniere disease

Diagnosing hearing loss

Your physician can use a number of techniques to determine if you are experiencing hearing loss, including:

• Physical exam: to identify structural problems, infection or earwax that may be interfering with your hearing
• Conversational observation: your physician can confirm hearing loss by holding a conversation with you
• Audiometry (hearing test): conducted by an audiologist, this test produces sounds of various pitches and loudness in earphones to test your hearing