What can cause hearing loss?
Damage to the outer, middle or inner ear. This can be from trauma, noise exposure, medication, autoimmune or metabolic disease conditions, tumors that are benign or malignant, or age-related changes. Just as with other organs and organ systems, there's degeneration of cells and nerves as we age.
What factors increase risk for developing age-related hearing loss?
In addition to the degeneration related to age, there's also noise exposure through the years and diseases of the ear that affect the middle ear like otosclerosis, which is the fixation of the ear bone, or Ménière's Disease. If you've had had a long-standing history of a chronic draining ear, which is called chronic otitis media, that will affect your chances of developing loss.
And of course, genetic background and general health will also affect the degree of hearing loss.
There are certain medical conditions that may affect your hearing loss such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Now, all the studies demonstrating this effect aren't excellent, controlled studies, but there is some thought, with diabetes for example, that the narrowing of blood vessels that occurs can compromise the blood flow in the ear, as it does in other organs, such as the kidneys and the eyes. With high blood pressure, it's not as clear-cut, but the thought is that anytime there's decreased blood flow to the inner ear, you can have some damage to your hearing.
