Month: December 2020

Have you felt overly tired lately? It might not be the shorter daylight hours or busy holiday season that are to blame. Your fatigued feeling might be due to hearing loss.
Now, you might be skeptical at first that hearing loss could cause real fatigue. After all, isn’t hearing something you do automatically and constantly, like breathing or blinking? It is true that you probably do not have to consciously tell your brain to hear things, but that does not mean that hearing is not tiring.
Think of a time when you were in a very noisy environment, such as a loud sporting event or a busy restaurant during the dinner rush. When the noise was at its loudest, were you able to easily hear the conversation with your friends and family? Did you feel like you needed to strain to be able to hear them properly? Or if the environment was too loud, did you ever simply give up on trying to follow the conversation? All of this demonstrates the mental strain (or cognitive load, as they call it in the medical field) that accompanies hearing.
If you have normal hearing, you may only notice the cognitive load of hearing in noisy conditions, like those mentioned above. You may also feel the strain when trying very hard to hear a noise, such as listening for disturbances in a quiet home at night or waiting to hear a certain animal call in nature. These circumstances make you realize that hearing does require exertion.
For people with hearing loss, however, many more environments and situations require careful attention and effort. The more time you spend straining to hear, and the more difficult it is to understand, the greater the cognitive load. This can lead to what is known as “ear fatigue,” when your brain becomes tired of trying to hear and make sense of what you hear. And while the term “ear fatigue” may indicate that only your ears might feel tired, in reality, it can lead to an overall feeling of exhaustion.
Because of the fatigue associated with hearing loss, many people with hearing loss begin to avoid social situations or noisy places that could increase their cognitive load and cause ear fatigue. Unfortunately, this strategy can backfire. When you avoid sounds, your auditory nerve does not have to work as hard. Over time, this can lead to an increased risk of dementia. The auditory nerve needs to be stimulated.
So, if you have been feeling overly tired lately, do not ignore it or chalk it up to a simple need for more rest and relaxation. You might be experiencing a symptom of hearing loss. If you have noticed that you no longer hear sounds that were once common to you, if you need to turn up the volume on the TV or radio, or if you frequently ask people to repeat themselves, you may be experiencing hearing loss.
The solution is simple: call your hearing healthcare professional and schedule a hearing assessment. The noninvasive hearing test can help you know whether hearing loss is to blame for your fatigue and other symptoms. We invite you to contact our practice today to learn more about ear fatigue and to schedule your hearing test.

With over nine months now since the beginning of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, you can probably list the common symptoms of COVID-19: fever, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, a cough, a new loss of taste or smell, fatigue, and more. But did you know that COVID has also been linked to sudden hearing loss?
Sudden onset sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) is a rapid, unexplained hearing loss that happens instantly or over just a few days. Also called sudden deafness, sudden hearing loss most often affects only one ear. In most cases, the cause is unknown.
In past months, a handful of cases of sudden hearing loss have been linked to COVID-19. In the first documented case of COVID-19-related sudden hearing loss in the UK, the patient had been admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) for serious symptoms. The 45-year-old male patient had asthma and was experiencing difficulty breathing due to COVID-19. He was placed on a ventilator for 30 days and received treatment with antiviral drug remdesivir. Once his condition began to improve, the man was released from the ICU and went home.
Approximately a week after going home from the hospital, however, the man noticed tinnitus (ringing in the ear) in his left ear. The tinnitus was followed by sudden hearing loss in that ear. The man had not experienced hearing problems in the past and was healthy prior to the COVID-19 diagnosis. After evaluating the man with both a physical exam and an MRI, doctors could not pinpoint a cause for the sudden hearing loss. This led them to theorize that the man’s sudden hearing loss was connected to COVID-19.
The patient underwent steroid treatment, which is the usual course of treatment for sudden hearing loss. This treatment partially improved his hearing but did not restore it to normal. In cases of sudden hearing loss, treatment outcomes are best when the steroids can be administered soon after the condition presents itself. The patient noted that his hearing loss may have started earlier than he realized due to the difficulty of recognizing his hearing loss in the busy hospital ICU.
At present, only a handful of cases of sudden hearing loss have been associated with COVID-19 (in Germany, Egypt, and Turkey), and doctors are uncertain as to how the two conditions are connected. They have hypothesized that the link may be found in the cells that line the middle ear. These cells have ACE-2 receptors, which the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) uses to get inside cells. Further research must be done to further explore the connection between COVID-19 and sudden hearing loss.
For patients diagnosed with COVID-19, screening for sudden hearing loss may present the best chance for identifying the condition early and allowing for fast treatment. If you have COVID-19, be aware of your hearing ability and report any hearing loss to your doctors as soon as possible. Early treatment is the best option for possibly recovering your hearing.
If you would like to learn more about the connection between sudden hearing loss and COVID-19, we welcome you to contact our hearing practice today. We are happy to answer your questions.