How Sharp Is Your Hearing?

We expect our eyes to change with age but hearing is often ignored. Victoria Lambert asks Professor Chris Raine, a Consultant ENT surgeon at Bradford Royal Infirmary, for advice

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Whether it’s for listening to Adele, traffic noise, birdsong – or just a friend’s voice, we’d all be lost without our hearing. Yet, as we age, it can be harder to catch sounds. And once we reach midlife, hearing problems are increasingly likely; 40% of over fifties have some level of presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss.

Yet most of us shy away from hearing tests. Deafness has long carried a stigma thanks to fears of being treated differently. Old-style hearing aids – large and unsightly – have a lot to answer for, but so do comedy programmes, which equate deafness with being grumpy or less intelligent.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of new ways to protect our hearing, and if necessary, support or enhance it, from cochlear implants to tiny digital hearing aids. On the horizon, research is being conducted to discover how to regrow the hairs in the middle ear where damage to hearing occurs.

What causes hearing loss?

High frequencies are typically affected first – think of “cocktail party deafness” when you struggle to follow conversations where there’s background noise. Most commonly loss of hearing is due to age-related damage affecting the tiny inner ear hair cells within part of the ear called the cochlea, or the hearing nerve (or both), and is called sensorineural hearing loss. Less common infections such as measles, mumps, rubella and meningitis can be to blame, or a traumatic event such as a car accident or a blow to the head.

Certain drugs such as types of chemotherapy and antibiotics called aminoglycosides are also known to damage the hair cells. Researchers at Washington State University in the US have developed a drug called Dihexa, which may be able to prevent the hair cell loss caused by aminoglycoside treatment and all toxic medications.