What are the potential causes of deafness?

Oct 03, 2012 in Hearing Protection

What are the potential causes of deafness?

In terms of hearing loss, there are a variety of things that can cause it, rather than one hard and fast issue.

For those of an older generation it's often just 'wear and tear', unfortunately it's a simple fact of life that when things are used regularly, eventually they start to deteriorate.

However there can also be instances where there is something fundamentally wrong with a person's ear structure which causes hearing loss and there can too be genetic or hereditary issues as well.

Whatever problem it is that causes deafness, you can usually rest assured that experts across the medical world are working hard to try and come up with a solution for it.

The universal way that deals with all manner of causes is the use of hearing aids, as these can help limit the effects of deafness, no matter what reason caused it in the first place.

Only recently, a gene that causes around 1,000 babies to be born deaf in Britain every year has been highlighted by researchers at a university in the US.

Those behind the study hope it will help to a number of new treatments to combat deafness.

They found the gene binds to a cell's calcium content and is a main factor in causing deafness and 'non-syndromic' hearing loss.

Dr Zubair Ahmed, one of the researchers, said the findings could also help develop new treatments.

"Researchers were able to pinpoint the gene which caused deafness in Usher syndrome type 1 as well as deafness that is not associated with the syndrome through the genetic analysis of 57 humans."

Between three and six per cent of children with hearing difficulties have this syndrome.

It's by no means the only cause of hearing loss for people but research such as this could help form new treatments and methods, ones that could help us in delivering our free hearing tests to you.