Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing at an early age due to illness, said the loss of hearing created a more severe social impairment than loss of vision.
Hearing loss affects more than 25 million Americans. And though considered a problem of the elderly, increasingly, young people are losing their hearing because of the noises to which they subject themselves.
"Rock concerts, boom cars, how we play stereos at home — the intensity of music can be as damaging to the ear as industrial sounds," said Don Worthington, director of the IHC Hearing and Balance Center. "The more repeated the exposure to loud noise, the more chance of causing permanent hearing loss."
Hearing loss and balance problems will be the topic of the Deseret News/Intermountain Health Care Hotline today from 10 a.m. to noon. Worthington and Bryan Layton, a clinical doctor of audiology, will field phoned-in questions.
In normal development, we are each born with 15,000 "little electrical generators in just the inner ear for hearing, in the cochlea," Worthington said. "With more and more noise exposure, the hair cells are damaged and/or destroyed."
He likens it to sod laid down between neighbors who like to visit each other. When you walk along the path between homes, the grass is knocked down but comes back. Do it every day, though, and "pretty soon there's a trail there where it's damaged or destroyed and won't come back. It's the same thing. When you're continually exposed to loud noise, you're going to lose the hairs. They cannot be replaced. And the sad thing is that we can't predict who will have more damage due to a particular exposure."
When he worked at a military hospital, he saw soldiers who suffered severe hearing loss in one trip to the firing range. And others who, though at the range day after day, had only small hearing loss.
"There is an individual susceptibility to that which we haven't been able to lock in on," said Worthington, who has a doctorate in audiology.
Layton said hearing loss comes in "myriad different configurations: mild, moderate, severe and profound.
"If you are having hearing loss bad enough to disrupt communication, you need to be checked and could benefit from hearing aids."
Most hearing problems are not medically treatable, he said, but those that are can be easy to treat. Anyone with hearing loss should be assessed.
"If you have to have hearing loss, this is a nice day and age to have it because devices are improving all the time," said Layton. "We're fitting people almost exclusively with state-of-the-art digital hearing instruments that sound really naturally. And where we're starting to make improvements now is in helping people understand even in the presence of noise. It's not perfected, but getting better."
The human ear has the ability to filter out the background. With hearing loss, that ability is lost and hearing aids have a hard time compensating for that "selective" ability. But it's getting better, he said.
E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com