Treatment and Research

Your doctor can recommend strategies to help reduce the effects of a hearing loss. Scientists are studying ways to develop new, more effective methods to treat and prevent hearing loss.

Many people who have a hearing loss wear a hearing aid. A hearing aid is an electronic, battery-operated device that makes sounds louder to the wearer. Unfortunately, only 20 percent of people who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wear one.

Hearing aids come in many shapes, sizes, and styles. Some hearing aids fit inside the outer ear or the ear canal, while others fit behind the ear. People with extreme hearing loss may wear a body aid, a larger hearing aid attached to a belt or worn in a pocket and connected by a wire to the ear.

Hearing aids can be analog or digital. Some analog aids are custom-built to meet a person's hearing needs. More advanced analog models can be adjusted with a computer to suit a number of environments, such as a room with a lot of background noise.

Digital hearing aids use a computer chip to process sounds, and are the most flexible in adjusting to different environments. They are also the most expensive.

An audiologist can help you determine if a hearing aid, or even two hearing aids, is the right treatment for you. Wearing two hearing aids may help balance sounds, improve your understanding of words in noisy situations, and make it easier to locate the source of sounds.

Other devices also can help you hear in certain listening environments. TV listening systems help you enjoy television or radio without being bothered by other sounds around you. Some hearing aids can be plugged directly into TVs, stereos, microphones, and personal FM systems to help you hear better.

Some telephones work with certain hearing aids to make sounds louder and remove background noise. And some auditoriums, movie theaters, and other public places are equipped with special sound systems that send sounds directly to your ears.

Alerts such as doorbells, smoke detectors, and alarm clocks can give you a signal that you can see or a vibration that you can feel. For example, a flashing light can let you know someone is at the door or on the phone.

If your hearing loss is severe and of a certain type, your doctor may suggest that you talk to an otolaryngologist -- a surgeon who specializes in ear, nose, and throat diseases -- about a cochlear implant.

A cochlear implant is a small electronic device that the surgeon places under the skin and behind the ear. The device picks up sounds, changes them to electrical signals, and sends them past the non-working part of the inner ear and on to the brain.

A cochlear implant does not restore or create normal hearing. Instead, it can help people who are deaf or who have a severe hearing loss be more aware of their surroundings and understand speech, sometimes well enough to use the telephone.

But learning to interpret sounds from the implant takes time and practice. A speech-language pathologist and audiologist can help you with this part of the process.

Researchers are studying the causes of hearing loss as well as new treatments. For example, they are studying ways to improve hearing aids so that wearers can hear sounds more clearly with little background noise.

They are also studying how to improve cochlear implants to enhance a person's ability to understand sounds. And they are discovering how fluids change in the inner ear as a person gets older, which may affect overall hearing ability.