Hearing tests may fail to detect common form of hearing loss

The traditional clinical hearing tests often fail to detect the common form of inner ear damage in patients. Such tests may not be able to diagnose those facing problems in certain situations, like hearing speech in a noisy room, said the study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. This type of "hidden hearing loss" presents itself as essentially normal hearing in the clinic, where audiograms -- the gold-standard for measuring hearing thresholds -- are typically conducted in a quiet room. It turns out that the central auditory system can compensate for significant damage to the inner ear by turning up its volume control, partially overcoming the deficiency, said the study's lead author Richard Salvi, Director, Centre for Hearing and Deafness at University at Buffalo, New York.