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Single sided deafness causes and treatmentPublished: Tuesday February 21, 2012, 10:12Have you or someone you know been diagnosed with unilateral deafness? Single sided deafness, or unilateral deafness, shows up in about 60,000 new cases every year in the United States.
This condition generally occurs suddenly in one ear while the other ear remains typically functioning. So, what causes this, and how can it be treated? This article aims to answer both questions.
Causes
Some people are born with unilateral deafness, and some experience it as a result of disease or environment. Known causes include physical trauma, measles, labyrinthitis, microtia, meningitis, or mumps (Epidemic parotitis). The rarest causes of unilateral deafness include acoustic neuromas, tumors surrounding the acoustic nerve, or Meniere disease, a disorder of the inner ear.
Symptoms
The severity and symptoms of Single Sided Deafness (SSD) will vary from person to person. In many cases, people with a unilateral loss have difficulty determining the direction of sound and tend to turn around in search of a sound's source. Some people experience the head shadow effect, or the inability to hear sound from a particular direction. These people may also find it difficult to separate background noise from those sounds they wish to hear, e.g. conversational speech.
In general, SSD is known to cause:
-irritability
-frequent headaches, stress
-social isolation
-variable light dizziness
-the appearance of inattentiveness
-mis-diagnoses as ADD
-missing social cues due, e.g. awareness of personal space and mood in others
Treatment
Over the past few years, awareness and treatment for unilateral hearing loss have seen improvements. Before this, treatment options were scarce, and people with the condition had to make changes in their job and lifestyle to compensate for the loss of hearing. Regular and waterproof hearing aids used for more typical losses were simply inappropriate forms of treatment.
Thankfully, the FDA has approved BAHA devices (bone anchored hearing aid) for the treatment of single sided deafness. A titanium screw is implanted into the skull, behind the deaf ear, and the area is allowed to heal- usually taking between 3-6 months. Once healed, the BAHA can snap directly on the screw and it picks up sound, conducting the sound to the hearing ear and neutralizing the head shadow effect.
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