Hearing impairment natural history, complications and prognosis

Different factors contribute to prognosis of hearing loss and psychological complications associated with deafness are a big concern for physicians.

65% of patients with sudden idiopathic sensorineural hearing loss recover completely within 14 days, independent of any type of medical or surgical treatment. There is a fundamental difference in the behavior of apical and basal cochlea losses recovery and hearing recovery is always better at low than at high frequencies.

Age-related hearing loss has been associated with^[1][2]

• Worse quality of life
• Depression
• Social isolation
• Functional decline
• Fall risk
• Increased hospitalization
• Increase Health care use
• Accelerated Cognitive decline
• Dementia

The prognosis for hearing recovery for idiopathic SSNHL depends on a variety of things including the severity of hearing loss, the shape of the audiogram, age of onset, presence of vertigo, and presence or absence of other risk factors.^[3][4]

Prognosis can be predicted according to the slope of the audiogram taken at the start of hearing difficulty (low-frequency losses do better than high-frequency losses), Inflammatory markers, erythrocyte sedimentation rates, hearing at 8 kHz, in some cases, it depends on speech discrimination scores and spatial disorientation symptoms.^[5]