Causes of Hearing Loss
There are numerous causes of hearing loss. Your hearing may be impacted, for instance, by brief or abrupt exposure to extremely loud noise, such as going to a loud concert.
Causes of conductive hearing loss include:
- Accumulated earwax in your ear.
- Otitis media [1], an infection of the middle ear.
- Middle ear fluid brought on by allergies or a cold.
- External swimmer’s ear (otitis externa) [2].
- Problems with your Eustachian tube could cause fluid buildup in your middle ear.
- Ear tumor.
- Damaged eardrum.
- You have something stuck in your ear. For instance, if your child is presented with a side dish of peas, they might go ahead and put it in their ear.
- Conditions that impact how babies’ inner or outer ears develop (congenital conditions).
Causes of sensorineural hearing loss include:
- Aging
- Diseases such as diabetes [3], high blood pressure (hypertension), strokes [4], or coronary artery disease [5]
- Ototoxicity [6]
- Getting struck on the head
- Certain (inherited) genetic disorders
- Loss of hearing due to noise. Exposure to loud noise over an extended period of time, such as working in extremely noisy environments like factories and construction sites.
- Congenital infections like cytomegalovirus [7] (CMV) infections.
Conductive hearing loss and sensorineural hearing loss are combined to form mixed hearing loss. This means that in addition to your inner ear, it also affects your middle and outer ears. You could experience mixed hearing loss, for instance, if you take drugs that damage your inner ear and you unintentionally rupture your middle ear’s eardrum.