Woken up with muffled hearing? Don’t just assume it’s just ear wax
Daily MailWaking up one morning, Leesa Barrell was alarmed to find that everything seemed very different. Leesa is one of up to 6,000 adults a year estimated to develop idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss, or unexplained hearing loss, that usually develops suddenly, or within three days, usually in one ear. ‘Eighty-five per cent of the time no one ever knows why sudden sensorineural hearing loss occurs because we can’t get to the inner ear to examine it without risking damaging it, or damaging the brain,’ says John Phillips, the consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital Foundation Trust who treated Leesa. Leesa was given a three week course of steroid tablets and she eventually regained 50 per cent of the hearing in her right ear although she still needed to have a hearing aid fitted This has helped ‘a lot’, she says, though she admits: ‘I feel much too young for one.’ A nasty consequence of her hearing loss has been severe tinnitus in her right ear. ‘It’s the worst part of the whole experience, like a constant waterfall in my ear.’ People with hearing loss often develop tinnitus, explains Mr Phillips.
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WHAT CAUSES HEARING LOSS? AND CAN IT BE TREATED?
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