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Answers to Your Questions on Wearing a Hearing Aid in a Loud Place

May 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Patients being fitted for a hearing aid to help them hear better often ask what the hearing aid will do with noises that are still too loud for them. Fortunately there’s a comforting answer to this question.

In a nutshell, modern hearing aids which are correctly fitted and adjusted are designed to avoid amplifying sounds that are already too loud. The phrase in bold type is the important part, and the reason why you should seek professional help with selecting and fitting your hearing aids.

The more complex answer has to do with the nature of modern digital hearing aids themselves, and how they work. Digital hearing aids receive sounds through their microphones and turn them into binary information that can then be processed by the hearing aid’s microchip before it is sent to the earphones. Your individual needs can be met with these digital hearing aids by programming and adjusting the maximum volume and the quality of sounds. If you have primarily high-frequency hearing loss, for example, we might program the hearing aid to amplify those sounds while reducing the volume of lower-frequency sounds. On the other hand, if you suffer from low-frequency hearing loss, the hearing aid settings would be reversed.

In addition, modern digital hearing aids are able to filter the sound to make it more understandable. This can make it easier for you to hear voices in the foreground because the hearing aid can detect and amplify those voices while suppressing the noises in the background. These digital hearing aids can even adjust dynamically to volume fluctuations such as a musician beginning a song very softly and then increasing the volume.Directional microphones assist this process by detecting the direction of sounds. They allow sounds from the direction you are facing while suppressing sounds from the side and behind.

One thing that hearing aids do not do with regard to loud sounds is protect your ears from them the way that ear plugs would. Loud sounds like chainsaws or overly amplified rock concerts, will therefore still be able to cause noise-induced hearing loss. However, the most common sounds you encounter should be handled by your properly fitted and programmed hearing aids.

Filed Under: Choosing a Hearing Aid Tagged With: , ,

Research Advances that Could Lead to Reversing Hearing Loss by Regenerating Hair Cells

May 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Among the sometimes bothersome things about being a hearing specialist is that many of the situations we encounter that have caused our patients to lose their hearing can’t be reversed. For example, one of the extremely common reasons for hearing loss is damage to the miniature, sensitive hair cells that line the inner ear and vibrate in response to sound. These vibrations are translated by the brain into what we call hearing.

The sensitivity of these tiny hair cells enables them to vibrate in such a manner, and thus enables us to hear, but their very sensitivity makes them very fragile, and prone to damage. Infections, certain medications, aging or prolonged exposure to loud sounds (resulting in noise-induced hearing loss/NIHL) are all potential sources of damage. In humans, once these hair cells are damaged or destroyed, they can’t be regenerated or “fixed.” Since we can’t reverse the damage, hearing specialists and audiologists look to technology instead. We make up for hearing loss due to inner ear hair cell damage with hearing aids and cochlear implants.

This wouldn’t be true if humans were more like chickens and fish. Unlike humans, some fish species and birds have the ability to regenerate their damaged inner ear hair cells and regain their lost hearing. Strange, but true. Chickens and zebra fish are just 2 examples of species that have the ability to spontaneously replicate and replace their damaged inner ear hair cells, thus allowing them to fully recover from hearing loss.

Could hearing loss in humans be reversed? Glimmers of hope are emerging from the innovative research of the Hearing Restoration Project (HRP), but the research is preliminary and no useful benefits for humans have yet been achieved. This research, funded by the non-profit Hearing Health Foundation, is presently being conducted in 14 labs in Canada and the US. What the HRP researchers are trying to do is isolate the compounds that allow this replication and regeneration in animals, with the purpose of finding some way of enabling similar regeneration of inner ear hair cells in humans.

The research is painstaking and challenging, because so many different molecules either contribute to replication or hinder hair cells from replicating. By determining which of the molecules regulate this process in avian or fish cochlea, the scientists are hoping to establish which compounds promote hair cell growth. The HRP researchers are taking a divide and conquer approach to attain their joint goal. While some labs work on gene therapies others work on approaches using stem cells.

As mentioned before, this research is still in its preliminary stages, but we join with others in wishing that it will bear fruit, and that someday we’ll be able to help humans reverse their hearing loss as easily as chickens do.

Filed Under: Anatomy and Physiology Tagged With: , , , , ,

What is Best – 1 or 2 Hearing Aids?

April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

“Should I wear 1 or 2 hearing aids?” This is a very typical question arising from the fact that hearing aids are a major financial investment.Most hearing specialists will say that the advantages of wearing two hearing aids greatly outweigh the additional expense, but to be fair let’s start with the main reasons why some individuals don’t require two.

To start with, if your hearing is completely normal in one ear, you plainly do not need a second hearing aid for that ear. Conversely, if you are totally 100 percent deaf in one ear, there is no point in having a second hearing aid. If you are prone to recurring ear infections, wearing hearing aids can potentially make the situation worse, so wearing a single aid might be an advantage. Also, if the nature of your hearing loss in one ear is that sounds are so distorted that you cannot understand speech at all through that ear, wearing a hearing aid in that ear will in many cases merely amplify the garbled speech, and make it more difficult for your brain to understand speech heard through your better ear.

Except for these cases, the arguments for wearing two hearing aids are pretty persuasive, and are validated by surveys of consumer preferences and customer satisfaction – most hearing aid users vastly prefer the binaural sound provided by two hearing aids. Wearing two hearing aids greatly improves your ability to detect the source and direction of the sound. Research studies have demonstrated that two hearing aids also improve your ability to understand speech – especially in noisy environments. One factor that is very important is that if you have hearing loss in both ears, wearing only one hearing aid can deprive the other ear of stimulation, causing it to further deteriorate and risking the possibility of total hearing loss in that ear. Two hearing aids are almost always better for people who have tinnitus, because hearing aids mask the ringing or buzzing sound, and wearing only one aid will allow it to continue in the other ear. Finally, many studies have shown that wearing two hearing aids is less tiring than wearing only one.

So the arguments for wearing two hearing aids seem to outweigh those for wearing only one. For many people making this decision, they need to experience the difference between one and two hearing aids first hand. You can test out the difference by scheduling an appointment to come see us. Then decide for yourself which provides you with the better hearing experience. We think you’ll decide that two is better than one.

Filed Under: Choosing a Hearing Aid Tagged With: , ,

Finding the Best Mobile Phone if You Use a Hearing Aid

April 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In the past, the complex electronics of mobile phones often interacted badly with the electronics of hearing aids, causing interference between the two devices that was perceived as static, squealing or whistling noises, or missing words. Technology enhancements along with new regulations have mostly eliminated this issue. Today cell phone – hearing aid compatibility isn’t the huge problem it once was. To help consumers shop for the right hearing aid compatible cell phone, the new regulations include a standard rating system and labeling requirement.

Understanding the rating system requires a bit of knowledge about the modes that hearing aids can operate in. There is an M mode (which stands for microphone) and a T mode (which stands for telecoil). In M mode, your hearing aid uses its built-in microphone to pick up audible sounds from the environment and amplify them so that you can hear them. When the hearing aid is in T mode, instead of the microphone it uses its built-in telecoil to directly pick up conversations from inside the phone, in the form of electromagnetic signals. The T mode is important when shopping for a phone, because at least 60% of hearing aids sold in the U.S. have one.

Under the new regulations, these two modes of operation have ratings that range from 1 (the lowest sensitivity) to 4 (the highest sensitivity). To be labeled as hearing aid compatible (HAC) a cell phone must carry a minimum rating of M3 or T3.

In addition, many hearing aids (and cochlear implants) have a similar M and T rating to measure their sensitivity and their resistance to radio frequency interference. If you know the M and T ratings for your hearing aid, to determine its compatibility with any mobile phone, just add the two sets of ratings together. If you get a combined total of 6 or more, that is thought of as excellent, a combination of hearing aid and phone that will be highly usable. If the combined rating is 5, this combination is considered normal and suitable for most regular phone use. A combined rating of 4 is considered usable for brief calls, but may not be suitable for extended phone use.

This combined rating system makes it easy to shop for a mobile phone online, because it easily allows you to determine how compatible it will be with your hearing aid. A better approach, of course, would be to go to a store that allows you to “try before you buy,” and actually use the phone you want while wearing your hearing aid, in both M and T modes.

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What is Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) and What Types of People is it Appropriate For?

April 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

It’s been projected that 50 million people in the U.S. over the age of 50 suffer from tinnitus. Those who have tinnitus hear continuous sounds that no one around them can hear. These sounds vary from high-pitched ringing or whistling sounds, buzzing, or rapid clicking sounds similar to crickets chirping. For some tinnitus sufferers, this persistent onslaught of noise is more of a distraction than an illness, but for many others it is a cause of intense distress, bringing about symptoms such as anxiety, fatigue, depression, and sleep disorders.

Tinnitus can be treated technologically, using electronic hearing aids that filter out or suppress the ringing or buzzing sounds, but another form of counseling known as Tinnitus Retraining Therapy approaches the condition from a different angle. The concept behind TRT is to retrain the brain to reduce sensitivity to the tinnitus noises. The idea is to lower the perceptions of the sounds and reduce negative reactions to the sounds.

Discovered in the 1980s by neuroscientist Pawel Jastreboff, TRT challenges the assumptions of many audiologists that tinnitus is a physical disorder due to ear damage that cannot be fixed. While it is true that exposure to loud sounds can cause tinnitus, Jastreboff proposed an alternative neuro-physical model based on his training in behavioral neuroscience. Thus freed from the temptation to regard the problem as something that cannot be fixed, he set about developing behavioral modification techniques that could fix it.

According to Jastreboff’s model, tinnitus is not a disease or condition in itself, but a function of hyperacusis – the ability of some people to become aware of normal sounds generated by the auditory system that most people filter out or are unaware of. In other words, it’s not the sounds themselves that are a problem, just the distress and over reaction to hearing them. Only people who have been trained in how to administer the TRT training can lead the counseling sessions, which use precise and individually-tuned techniques of training and sound therapy to teach people to eliminate their over reactions to the sounds they don’t want to hear, and instead focus on sounds they do want to hear.

Counselors trained in TRT have had remarkable successes helping patient eliminate their negative reactions to the sounds they hear, thereby relieving distress.

Filed Under: Tinnitus Tagged With: ,

Why Can I Hear Male Voices Easily but not Women’s and Children’s Voices?

April 4, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you’re finding it tougher to hear ladies voices or children’s voices than to hear male voices, it could be a sign that you’ve suffered some amount of high-frequency hearing loss. The voices of most women and children fall into a higher frequency range – generally 165 to 255 Hertz – while male voices are typically lower frequency at 85 to 180 Hertz. On top of that, the volume of women’s and children’s voice are often less audible because they speak more quietly that men. By making an appointment with one of our hearing specialists you can find out for sure what the nature of the problem is, and how to best treat it.

High-frequency hearing loss is the most common among all forms of hearing loss. There are many possible causes; among the possibilities are aging, exposure to loud noises, certain diseases and certain drugs. But whatever the cause, the important thing is that as a result of technological advances, hearing loss can be treated.

Digital hearing aids are an effective treatment option because their sophisticated electronics allow the aids to be adjusted or programmed to “favor” one set of frequencies over another. For people with high-frequency hearing loss, the digital hearing aid raises the volume of high-frequency (high-pitched) sounds more than it raises the volume of the lower-frequency (low-pitched) sounds. Another treatment option is the use of open-fit hearing aids, which leave your ear canal open or partially open, so that low-frequency and mid-frequency sounds enter the ear normally, and only the high-frequency sounds are amplified. A third option for very severe cases of high-frequency hearing loss is a cochlear implant. This is a more expensive solution because the implantation procedure requires minor surgery, but it can be effective in the treatment of conditions such as nerve deafness and industrial deafness.

But the first step to finding a solution to your hearing problem is to have an examination, and allow our specialists to determine what the nature of it actually is. Your hearing exam could reveal that your high-frequency hearing loss is caused by a treatable blockage such as a build up of ear wax and can be easily corrected.If you are currently having trouble hearing women’s and children’s voices, stop worrying about what might be causing it and make an appointment to get the true answer.

Filed Under: Hearing Loss Tagged With: , , , ,

Central Auditory Processing Disorder – An Introduction

March 31, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Central Auditory Processing Disorder, or CAPD, is a hearing disorder in which the trouble lies not with the ears, but with the brain. People with Central Auditory Processing Disorder have no difficulty hearing sounds – especially speech – but, their brains don’t interpret the sound inputs correctly. The disorder is thus characterized by a lack of coordination between the ears and the brain.

Central Auditory Processing Disorder affects as many as 2% to 5% of school-age children, and as many as half of the children are diagnosed as having a learning disability. Children with Central Auditory Processing Disorder often cannot discern the sounds of different words even when the words are spoken loud and clear. The problem is worsened with background noise and in some cases of Central Auditory Processing Disorder the child can hear well in quite environments and only has difficulty in noisy environments.

This can make CAPD hard to detect. A child that can hear and intrepret speech well in a quiet environment will generally have no problems passing a hearing test administered in a quiet environment. As a result, their audiogram results may appear normal, but they may nevertheless have difficulties distinguishing similar words, locating where sounds are coming from, recognizing repetitive patterns in high and low sounds, or hearing more than one person’s voice at a time.

These symptoms may carry over into other areas of life, as the children struggle to cope with not being able to understand people speaking to them. The disorder may manifest itself in a difficulty following instructions, being easily distracted by loud noises, appearing forgetful or disorganized, or slow to develop reading, spelling and language skills. Since standard hearing test for these children often yield normal results, these indicators are often mistaken for other disorders such as ADHD or depression. In reality, CAPD can be present alone or combined with these other disorders, presenting a difficult diagnostic challenge.

Early detection of CAPD is critical, because to ensure the child’s proper social and educational development, the sooner the problems are diagnosed, the sooner they can be treated. So if you have noticed in your children any of the possible signs of CAPD listed above, it is important to have their hearing tested by experienced professionals.

Filed Under: Anatomy and Physiology Tagged With: , , ,

Being Safe at Home when a Loved One is Hearing Impaired

March 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

One subject which is rarely mentioned with regards to hearing loss is how to keep those who have suffered it safe in their homes. For instance, imagine that a fire starts in your home; if you are like most of us you have smoke detectors to sound an alert so that you and your family can evacuate the home before a fire spreads too far and traps you. But this time imagine further, and ponder what might happen if your smoke alarm goes off at night after you’ve gone to sleep, having removed your hearing aid.

The smoke alarms common in most homes and those required by city and local governments emit a loud warning tone at a frequency between 3,000 and 4,000 Hz. Although the majority of people can hear these tones easily, these frequencies are among those most impacted by age-related hearing loss and other forms of auditory problems. So if you are among the more than eleven million Americans with hearing loss, there’s a good chance that you simply wouldn’t hear your smoke alarm even if you were awake.

Luckily, there are home safety products which are specifically created for the requirements of the hearing impaired. For example, there are smoke detectors that emit a low-frequency (520 Hz) square wave tone that a majority of hearing-impaired people can hear. For those who are totally deaf, or who are unable to hear whatsoever when they take out their hearing aids or turn off their cochlear implants (CIs) at night, there are alert systems that combine extremely loud alarms, blinking lights, and vibrators that shake your bed to warn you. Many of these systems are intended to be incorporated into more extensive home security systems to alert you to burglars or neighbors pounding madly on your door in the case of an emergency.

To hear other sounds that may indicate danger, many hearing-impaired people have installed induction loops in their homes to improve the performance of their hearing aids or cochlear implants. An induction loop is merely a lengthy wire that surrounds your family room, bedroom, or children’s rooms, which activates the telecoils embedded in your devices to increase the volume of sounds, and thus can help you not to miss any important or emergency notifications.

We should not forget the basic telephone, which is indispensable in an emergency of any kind. The majority of present day telephones now can be found in models that are hearing aid and CI-compatible, which permit their use during either normal or extraordinary conditions. Plus, there are phones specifically designed for the hearing impaired which incorporate speakerphones that function at high volumes, and which may be voice-activated. These devices allow you to voice-dial for assistance in an emergency situation, or if you needed assistance of any kind. There are other accessories for mobile phones, such as vibrating wristbands that can inform you of an incoming call even if you’re sleeping.

Obviously, some home safety suggestions for the hearing impaired are the same as for people who can hear well, such as always keeping lists of your health care providers, emergency service providers, and hospitals close by. If we can be of assistance to you in helping to make your home safer for the hearing impaired, give us a call; we’ll be very happy to assist.

Filed Under: Hearing Loss Tagged With: , , , ,

Detecting Typical Signs of Hearing Loss in Others

March 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Hearing loss may appear in many forms, and may occur either suddenly, as the result of injury or trauma, or gradually, due to aging. The hearing loss itself can be short-term or permanent, and can range from mild (having trouble understanding conversations) to severe (complete deafness). Moreover, a person can experience a loss of hearing in a single ear or both ears.

Probably the most often reported symptom of hearing loss is progressively becoming unable to hear and understand conversations properly. People’s speaking voices might seem to be at too low a volume (as if the speakers were far away), or sound muffled . You may be able to hear folks speaking, but not be able to differentiate specific words, especially if more than one person is speaking or the conversations are taking place in settings with a lot of background noise.

Other usual symptoms of hearing loss include having to increase the volume on your TV or radio, having a harder time hearing men’s voices than women’s, and the inability to differentiate sounds like ‘s’ and ‘th’ from one another. Other types of hearing loss may be indicated if you notice a constant ringing or humming in the ears, feel pain, tenderness or itching in the ears, and if you have episodes of dizziness or vertigo.

One of the difficulties with hearing loss is that it may arise so gradually that people are themselves not aware of it. This can sometimes lead to actions or behaviors intended to hide their hearing loss from others. For example, people attempting to conceal hearing loss may ask others to repeat themselves frequently, can tend to avoid conversations and social gatherings, fake having heard things they really didn’t, and over time can develop feelings of isolation and depression.

If any of these signs and symptoms sound familiar to you, it’s time to make an appointment with one of our hearing specialists. They will give you a hearing test to determine whether you have indeed experienced hearing loss, and if so, can help you to do something about it.

Filed Under: Hearing Loss Tagged With: , , ,

The Basics of Analog versus Digital Hearing Aids

March 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

When trying to fully understand the difference between analog and digital hearing aids, you need to first appreciate the history of analog vs digital, and the different ways that they process and amplify sounds. Historically, analog technology emerged first, and as a result most hearing aids were analog until digital signal processing (DSP) was invented, after which digital hearing aids appeared. Most (roughly 90%) hearing aids sold in the United States at this point are digital, although you can still find analog hearing aids because some people have a preference for them, and they are typically cheaper.

Analog hearing aids handle inbound sounds by taking the electrical sound waves as they leave a microphone and amplifying them “as is” prior to sending the sound waves to the speakers in your ears. Digital hearing aids take the sound waves from the microphone and convert them to digital binary code, the “bits and bytes” and “zeros and ones” that all digital devices understand. This digital data can then be manipulated in many complex ways by the micro-chip inside the hearing aid, before being converted back into regular analog signals and delivered to the speakers.

Analog and digital hearing aids carry out the same work – they take sounds and boost them to enable you to hear better. Both analog and digital hearing aids can be programmable, meaning that they contain microchips that can be customized to adjust sound quality to match the user, and to develop various configurations for different environments. The programmable hearing aids can, for example, have one particular setting for listening in quiet rooms, another for listening in loud restaurants, and still another for use in large stadiums.

Digital hearing aids, due to their ability to manipulate the sounds in digital form, often offer more features and flexibility, and are commonly user-configurable. For example, digital hearing aids may offer multiple channels and memories, allowing them to store more location-specific profiles. They can also employ advanced algorithms to identify and minimize background noise, to eliminate feedback and whistling, or to selectively detect the sound of voices and “follow” them using directional microphones.

Cost-wise, most analog hearing aids are still less expensive than digital hearing aids, but some reduced-feature digital hearing aids are now in the same general price range. There is often a perceivable difference in sound quality, but the question of whether analog or digital is “better” is up to the wearer, and the ways that they are used to hearing sounds.

Filed Under: Choosing a Hearing Aid Tagged With: , , ,
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