Now hear this

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Mar 6, 2000 by LISA M. SODDERS Capital-Journal

By LISA M. SODDERS

The Capital-Journal

Hearing loss can sneak up on you. You're not losing your hearing; other people are mumbling. How can anyone expect to hear clearly with all that noise in the background? What do you mean, the TV is too loud?

Most people endure five to six years of hearing loss before they do see a doctor or audiologist, said Kevin Ruggle, a Topeka audiologist at the Audiology Center, 920 S.W. Washburn. And most of the time, they make an appointment after a family member or loved one makes them do it.

Hearing loss isn't limited to the elderly. About one in 1,000 infants is born deaf and four out of 1,000 have some degree of hearing disorder, said Dr. Thomas Gray, an audiologist with Audiology Associates in Manhattan. In the past, doctors were unable to diagnose hearing loss until the child was old enough to respond to tests, but now infants can be screened, and Kansas recently passed a newborn screening law.

Some teenagers discover they have hearing loss when they try to join the military, Ruggle said. Hobbies such as target shooting or listening to loud music can damage hearing. Society in general also is much louder than it used to be, Gray said. Movies have the soundtrack blasted at full volume and even the music at some aerobics classes may be too loud.

"The majority of people over 65 or 70 have some degree of hearing loss and very few of them do anything about it," Gray said. "There's a lot of stigma (associated with hearing loss). They think it makes them seem old.

"Hearing aids don't make them seem old; hearing loss makes them seem old," Gray added. "The technology is so much better than it was just a few years ago. There's no excuse for people" to not get help.

Ruggle agreed: If a person asks someone else to repeat things several times, the other person might not think "hearing loss," but may assume the person just wasn't paying attention or isn't very bright.

To a certain extent, the stigma of wearing a hearing aid is going away, Ruggle said. Many now equate hearing aids with glasses: "If you need the help, you get the help and there's no excuses now because the technology is very good."

Baby boomers in particular have seen their parents struggle with hearing loss and old-fashioned hearing aids, and don't want to experience the same problems, Ruggle said. They're more educated and aware of their options. President Clinton's hearing loss was "borderline," Ruggle noted, yet Clinton chose to get hearing aids right away, rather than wait.

Sound waves travel down the ear canal, bounce against the eardrum and cause the tiny bones in the middle ear to vibrate, according to the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide. Those vibrations are then sent to the cochlea, a snail-shaped organ in the middle ear. Inside the cochlea are thousands of tiny hairs which vibrate and send signals to the auditory nerve, which are then carried to the brain. Much like that annoying neighborhood kid who wears a path by cutting across your front yard every day, if the hairs become worn down by too much exposure to a particular frequency, (or disease, injury, certain drugs or an inherited condition) they stop responding to sounds, Ruggle said.

The first hearing aids basically just amplified all sounds equally, Ruggle said. These hearing aids, known as linear hearing aids, usually had just one channel, with all frequencies handled more or less the same, Gray added.

Digital hearing aids, on the other hand, are much more precise, Gray said. Developed only a few years ago, most are multi-channel, allowing for the manipulation of sounds in different frequency bands. Many of them are programmable by computer so only those frequencies that need to be amplified are changed and if a person's hearing loss gets worse, they can be adjusted. Best of all, digital hearing aids adjust the volume automatically, performing millions of calculations per second, much faster than a person could adjust a volume knob manually.

Widex hearing aids, for example, feature an automatic sound stabilizer for fast adjustments to sudden changes in the sound environment while still maintaining speech dynamic range. They also feature 20-bit processing (up to 27 bits in some applications) which is more than some desktop computers. They also have automatic feedback management and can do 40 million calculations per second to maintain sound quality. Other manufacturers of digital hearing aids include Siemens, Oticon and Starkey, said Ruggle.

CIC hearing aids, or completely-in-canal, are tiny hearing aids that are placed out of sight in the ear canal. These are popular with younger people, which is good, because the earlier one addresses hearing loss, the better, Ruggle said. It's thought that proper treatment can help slow hearing loss.

Before the new digital hearing aids, patients complained that all they could hear was noise, Gray said, but they would grumble that the hearing aids were better than nothing. Today, with the new digital ones, he actually has patients tell him that they like their hearing aids.