Sometimes it’s easy to believe that health conditions are isolated to one part of the body. But that’s not true; for example, heart disease doesn’t just affect the heart. Health conditions like these are complex and have ripple effects on your overall health. One ripple effect often overlooked is hearing loss.
The Basics: How Hearing Works
Today, we want to do a deep dive into how other health conditions may affect hearing. Before we do that, let’s quickly review how the hearing (auditory) system works so you can contextualize how it fits into everything.
Sound waves enter the ear, travel down the ear canal and strike the eardrum. The eardrum vibrates and amplifies the sound waves deeper into the ear (much like a drum). Then, the amplified vibrations enter the main hearing organ, the cochlea. The walls of the cochlea are lined with thousands of sensory cells shaped like small hairs, and the chamber is filled with fluid. The vibrations from the sound wave create waves in the fluid, causing the hair cells to sway. Through this swaying motion, the sensory cells encode the vibrations as electrical signals, which they then send to the brain via the auditory nerve. The auditory processing complex zone of the brain receives these signals and processes them as sound, and that’s how we hear.
With this information in mind, let’s dive into other health conditions.
Cardiovascular Health Conditions
The cardiovascular system consists of the heart, arteries and blood vessels, and it’s responsible for delivering oxygen and nutrients to all the cells and organs in your body via blood. Like all cells, the sensory cells in the cochlea rely on healthy, steady, oxygen-rich blood flow to function, and they can be sensitive to atypical or interrupted blood flow. If blood flow is interrupted and the sensory cells are starved of oxygen, they can grow brittle or even deteriorate.
Many heart and cardiovascular conditions will impede blood flow in one way or another. Here are some of the most common examples:
- Hypertension. High blood pressure, or hypertension, occurs when blood flows through your arteries at higher-than-normal pressure, putting strain on the walls of your blood vessels.
- Anemia. Iron-deficiency anemia occurs when your body has low iron (usually due to bleeding or low iron in your diet), which your bone marrow needs to create hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells responsible for transporting oxygen throughout the body. Low hemoglobin levels mean less oxygen is being moved around the body.
- Heart disease. Coronary heart disease is one of the leading causes of death among adults in the United States. It occurs when blood vessels become narrowed or blocked.
- Diabetes. Blood uses a protein called insulin to transport and deliver glucose (sugar), the main source of energy for cells. With diabetes, the body doesn’t create enough insulin, causing glucose to build up in the bloodstream instead of being delivered to the cells.
Studies show that there’s a relationship between the health of the cardiovascular system and the health and functionality of the auditory system, and that’s due primarily to the cells getting the oxygen and energy they need from blood.
Neurological Health Conditions
As discussed in the Basics section above, the auditory processing complex in the brain is where sound is processed and perceived. Essentially, your ears just collect sound information, but it’s your brain that truly hears. Therefore, if there are any neurological or cognitive conditions that could influence the auditory processing complex, it will change how you hear.
Moreover, your brain is an organ just like any other, and it requires energy to function. Energy is not an infinite resource, so if your brain is using a lot of energy on some other process, it might have less energy to spend on processing and perceiving sound.
Here are some common examples of neurological health conditions that can affect the auditory processing complex:
- Brain tumors. Growths (both benign and malignant) on the brain or on critical nerves that lead to the brain can press against and damage the auditory nerve or the auditory processing complex.
- Traumatic brain injury (TBI). When the brain suffers blunt force or trauma, it can bruise or damage the auditory processing complex.
- Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive nervous system and brain disorder that impacts the body’s movements, causing shaking and slowed movement. It is believed that Parkinson’s impairs sensory processing, which includes hearing.
- Stroke. A stroke occurs when the blood supply to a part of the brain is blocked, depriving that area of oxygen.
Viruses
Believe it or not, even common viruses can affect hearing. The way by which a virus impacts the auditory system will vary depending on the virus (its severity, what part of the body it targets, what symptoms are associated with it, etc.), but here are some of the main ways:
- Middle ear infection, which can cause the middle ear to fill with fluid and inhibit the pathway of sound waves to the inner ear
- Upper respiratory infection, which can cause inflammation in the sinuses or throat, which may swell and impede the ear canal or disturb the cochlea
- Direct damage to the auditory nerve, which can happen if the infection reaches the nervous system
- Autoimmune disorders, in which your immune system attacks healthy body tissue, such as the cells in the ear, instead of the foreign invaders
Some viruses associated with hearing loss include measles, mumps, HSV types 1 and 2 and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), West Nile Virus, Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV), and “long COVID.”
In Conclusion
We want to discuss these connections to inform and empower you on how to take care of your overall health while dealing with conditions like these. Don’t think of health conditions as isolated; they affect the whole network of your body in various ways.
As a result, if you find yourself managing a health condition with a known link to hearing loss, it’s wise to be proactive about that link and advocate for hearing health care as a part of your treatment plan. Schedule a hearing test to establish your hearing baseline, then continue getting regular hearing tests to monitor for any changes so you can take action as soon as possible.
If you have any questions about hearing health comorbidities or about how health conditions can impact hearing, call our experts at Aspen Audiology.