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What Doctors Say

      • Dr Chan Kwai Onn
      • Consultant, ENT Sinus & Sleep Surgeon
  • What you can do to cut the risks of noise-induced hearing loss?
  • Noise-related deafness can happen in two ways: gradually or suddenly.
  • Gradual and increasing hearing loss happens over time or years later. It occurs when you are repeatedly exposed to loud noise. Initially, a hearing loss may be temporary. For example, someone who finds their hearing a bit muffled after a night in the disco might recover the next morning, but this could be a sign of problems to come. However, if the exposure continues or the ear is not given ample time to recover, the hearing loss becomes permanent and irreversible.
  • Acoustic trauma is an immediate loss of hearing after a sudden, exceptionally loud noise, such as a gun shot or an explosion.
  • However, both types of hearing loss will damage the hair cells in the inner ear, which is called sensorineural hearing loss. For most people, hearing loss is age-related, usually starting when they are in their sixties. But I see an increasing number of younger patients in their thirties, forties or fifties who encounter hearing problems, having noise-induced high frequency hearing loss. Most of them have no problem in one to one conversations, but face difficulties when there is background noise, for instance, in a busy restaurant or during group conversations.
  • For this type of hearing loss, speech remains loud but clarity, which is related to high frequent consonants such as ‘S’, ‘P’, ‘T’, ‘H’, ‘K’, ‘F’, will be affected. As a result, speech intelligibility is reduced. In this case, wearing a hearing aid may not be a cosmetically attractive option but necessary to ensure continuous performance in your work and to avoid social isolation. The good news is that hearing aid manufacturers increasingly focus on high frequency hearing losses. Therefore, hearing aids are no longer big and noisy like the flesh-coloured ones that your grandparents used to complain about. Nowadays, they can hardly be noticed and are technically very advanced.
  • Who’s at risk?
  • There's a cumulative effect - more noise for longer is more likely to damage your hearing. That means you might be at risk while working in a noisy environment such as a factory or construction site, shooting without sufficient ear protection or playing or listening to loud music. Although there are so far no long-term studies on hearing loss caused by MP3 players, more and more young people complain about increased difficulties in understanding conversations.
  • How to prevent noise-induced hearing loss?
  • The best thing is not to lose your hearing in the first place. Everyone should limit their exposure to noise or reduce the risk of hearing loss by wearing the appropriate ear protection.
      • Dr. Ronald Brett
      • Consultant ENT Surgeon
      • MBBS (S’pore)
      • FRCS (Edin) FRCS (Glas)
      • FAMS (Otolaryngology)
  • Do you know that hearing aids stimulate your brain activity?
  • Hearing aids not only compensate hearing loss, but also assist your brain to remember the sounds you cannot hear without your hearing aids.
  • Generally, it takes 10 years for people suffering from hearing loss to admit that they have a hearing problem, till they do the first step and finally get fitted with hearing aids. Many people do not take their hearing problem serious enough and simply wait for it to go away, which rarely happens. They would rather help themselves by turning up the volume of the TV or asking people to repeat what they have said.
  • Not only that untreated hearing loss will affect your quality of life, the brain’s ability to remember common sounds will also be affected because the auditory pathway is no longer effectively used.
  • As a result, the hearing nerves lose their function and will not direct acoustic signals to the brain. The brain then ’forgets’ the sounds over time and loses the ability to understand them.
  • Memory Deterioration
  • The part of the brain responsible for hearing / understanding stores sounds and noises for up to three years following the onset of a hearing loss. Unfortunately, after about seven years, the memory becomes weaker and weaker.
  • For that reason, it is important to have your hearing annually tested and in case of hearing loss, hearing aids should be fitted. Thereafter, your hearing process will continue to supply the brain with necessary information (acoustic signals).
  • Learning to Hear Again
  • However, if the fitting of a hearing aid is seriously delayed, sometimes not even a hearing aid will be able to transform the incoming acoustic signals into understandable information. This means that the brain no longer recognizes common sounds and noises, such as the chirping of birds, rustling leaves, or the humming of the air-conditioner. The brain then must readapt and learn to hear all over again.
  • If you suspect that your hearing is not that good anymore, do not ignore it and get your hearing tested.