Symptoms & Causes

If you have sudden, severe hearing loss, you will notice right away that your ability to hear has decreased significantly or disappeared totally in the affected ear. For example, you may snap your fingers next to the affected ear and not hear it, or you may put the telephone receiver against your ear and hear nothing.

If your hearing loss is gradual, symptoms may be more subtle. You may have difficulty understanding conversations, either in person or on the telephone. Family members may complain that you play the radio or TV too loudly. You may ask them to repeat what they say or frequently misunderstand what they are saying.

Some diseases and conditions that cause hearing loss may produce additional symptoms, including:

• Ringing in the ears (tinnitus)
• Discharge or bleeding from the ear
• Deep earache, or pain in the ear canal
• Pressure or a "stuffy" feeling inside the ears
• Dizziness or problems with balance or equilibrium
• Nausea

Diagnosis

After you describe your symptoms, the doctor will ask if anyone in your family has (or has had) hearing loss. He/she will want to know if you have been exposed to loud noises, trauma of the ear or head, or ear infections. To rule out the possibility that medications may be the cause, your doctor will review the prescription and over-the-counter drugs you take. The physician will examine you and look closely at your ears. This may include:

• Examination of your ear canal and eardrum using a lighted instrument for looking inside the ears (otoscope)
• The Rinne test, in which a vibrating tuning fork is placed on the bone behind your ear to test for conductive hearing loss
• The Weber test, in which a vibrating tuning fork is placed in the middle of your forehead to help diagnose one-sided hearing loss
• Audioscopy testing, in which the doctor uses a hand-held device to generate tones of various intensities to find out if you can hear them

Our audiologists will test your hearing sensitivity (with audiometry) and check for middle-ear problems by measuring your eardrum's ability to reflect sounds (impedance testing). Further testing and treatment will follow.