There are many tiny hair cells in the human inner ear. These capillary cells are specially used to collect sound and transmit it to the brain through the auditory nervous system. With age, hair cells will gradually decrease or damage, and then cause deafness, called sensory deafness. At the same time, it may be accompanied by a decrease in auditory neurons and atrophy of auditory nerve cells, leading to central deafness. If you have suffered from otitis media, otosclerosis, Meniere and other diseases in the early years, it will be intertwined with presbycusis and evolve into mixed deafness.
Daily performance of the elderly after hearing loss:
– Always turn on the volume when watching TV;
– Speak close to others, speak loudly, and often ask others to speak louder;
– Easily interrupted when talking, and answering the wrong questions;
– Often can’t hear phone calls and door bells;
– Difficulty communicating with people in restaurants, buses, or in noisy environments;
– Slow response to sounds far away or behind;
– Often cannot hear the conversations on the phone, or can only use the fixed ear to listen to the phone;
– Listening to other people’s speech feels very laborious and prone to fatigue;
– With indirect or persistent tinnitus;
– When speaking with people, you are grumpy and complain, always asking others to re-speak what you just said;
– Unwilling to answer other people’s words, not responding to surrounding voices, and doing his own thing by himself.
Routine procedure of hearing test:
1. Ear examination
A professional optician will check the external auditory canal for you, and prepare for the next hearing test and the final solution.
2. Pure tone audiometry
You just need to sit in the listening room, put on the headphones, and listen carefully to the sounds of different tones and intensities in the headphones. If you can hear it, use a transponder to feed it back to the listener. After the test is over, the optician will give you a hearing report and explain to you the current situation of hearing and the solutions that can be taken.
The World Health Organization’s classification standards for hearing impairment:
3, inspection results
What kind of hearing loss is judged?
Conductive hearing loss
The diseased part is generally distributed in the outer ear or middle ear. The degree of hearing loss is generally between mild to moderate. Conductive hearing loss
Sensorineural hearing loss
There is no problem with the outer and middle ears, and the cochlea or auditory nerves have problems with sound perception. The degree of hearing loss varies, generally showing a slope-shaped hearing curve with good low frequencies and poor high frequencies. Sensorineural hearing loss
Mixed hearing loss
It has the dual characteristics of conductivity and sensory nerve.
4, the choice of hearing aids for the elderly
The first step: power selection. Different hearing aids have different powers and should be selected according to the degree of hearing loss. Similar to the degree of glasses, you should choose the same according to your eyesight.
Step 2: Performance selection The performance selection of hearing aids depends on your personal needs and listening preferences.
1). What do you need…
The main purpose of basic hearing aids is to make listening speech easier and satisfy basic communication.
2). What do you want…
Advanced hearing aids are easier to meet your individual needs. This grade of hearing aids are automatically adjusted according to your environment, making communication easier, especially in a noisy environment, you can feel the help of hearing aids
3). What do you particularly wish…
High-end hearing aids can provide a rich variety of sounds. Not only allows you to hear and hear clearly, but also allows you to hear more fully, restoring a sound scene that is close to real.