Feb 10
4
Can you hear me now?
I hear but I don’t understand…
That’s one of the most common complaints that we as audiologists hear from our patients. These people report that “kids just don’t speak clearly anymore”, and that at large social gatherings they feel lost in the conversation because they just can’t hear, no matter how loud their friends are speaking.
Healthy women who have not had a history of noise or chemical exposure tend to notice a natural loss of hearing sensitivity during their 60s. We can document that sort of hearing loss on an audiogram when they come in for a routine hearing test. The typical age related loss of hearing happens in the high pitch tones, leaving the sensitivity in the low pitch tones normal. In speech, consonants are higher pitch than vowels. So when this sort of hearing loss occurs, patients are not able to hear sounds like “s”, “f”, “th” and other high pitch consonants. And because the consonants are the sounds that make a word intelligible, these patients are hearing lots of low-tone vowel sounds, and their brains can’t really make sense of the words. We call this a peripheral hearing loss, meaning that it’s the ear that is no longer as sensitive as it should be. Digital amplification can help with this kind of hearing loss.
However, many women in 30s, 40s, and 50s complain that they are unable to hear well despite the fact that they have perfect peripheral hearing when tested in a sound booth. The issue here is “central auditory processing”, which mean that the ear is receiving the sounds as it should, but the brain may not be processing the sound as quickly as they’d like.
Central auditory processing problems can be linked to numerous issues. We as women usually have a lot on our minds as we try to multitask during the day. If someone speaks to us when we are in the middle of an important task, our brains may disregard verbal input until we complete the task at hand.
If we are in a noisy environment, a party or restaurant for example, our brains may have to sort out the important verbal information from the background noise. This may cause a delay in verbal recognition.
New research is pointing to estrogen as a mediator of verbal recognition and memory in the brain. Though more studies need to be performed, scientists are discovering that a woman’s loss of estrogen during the menopausal years may lead to issues of central auditory processing.
It’s important to remember that if you are concerned about your hearing in any way, you should have it evaluated by an audiologist. She will make recommendation for you based on your lifestyle and needs.
Amy S. Bannerman, M.A., CCC/A
Clinical Audiologist
