Is There a Connection Between Hearing Loss and Tinnitus?

Hearing loss and a ringing in the ears are both hearing-related conditions. Hearing loss is when your hearing ability gets worse, while tinnitus is a subjective sound that sounds like a strong whine, screech or buzz in your ears. This means that only you can hear the noise, which is coming from damaged nerves in your ear. But this is also how people lose their hearing.

Nerve damage can cause both hearing loss and tinnitus, but they are not the same thing. They are just caused by the same thing. Tinnitus is thought to be the brain’s method of compensating for the fact that your ear can’t hear sounds at certain frequencies. This article will go into depth about both tinnitus and loss of hearing so that you can learn more about both circumstances and how they are related.

Why does Tinnitus happen?

Most of the time, ringing in the ears is caused by loud sounds. This can be triggered by a single loud noise, like a blast or scream or by being around the loud noises for a long time, like on a construction site or in a club. It can happen even when you’re having a good time. If you are around loud sounds for a long time, you are more likely to get tinnitus. But tinnitus can also be caused by pain in the head or neck.

This is only one of a few things that can cause tinnitus, however, it is a possibility and doesn’t have to be linked to your hearing.

What Causes Hearing Loss?

Hearing loss can be temporary or permanent, and most of the time it happens slowly over a long period of time. Getting older is often what causes hearing loss. As we age, changes in the inner ear can make it harder for nerves to travel from the ear to the brain. This can cause hearing loss. But it can also happen suddenly for the same causes that tinnitus can.

If you hear a loud, sudden noise, it can hurt the nerves in your ear and cause you to lose your hearing. Since hearing depends on the nerves in our ears, any nerve or central nervous system disorder, such as a stroke, can also cause hearing loss. A blow to the head or neck can also cause hearing loss, just like tinnitus.

Is There a Connection Between Tinnitus and Hearing Loss?

Damage to the ear causes both hearing loss and ringing in the ears, so they go together. But they can also happen on their own and one can lead to the other. Many people who have tinnitus don’t lose their hearing because the quantity of nerve damage makes a big difference in how the situation turns out. But tinnitus is more likely to happen to people with untreated hearing loss.

Many hearing health professionals will tell you to use hearing aids to treat both hearing problems and ringing in your ears. Hearing aids are made to make sounds louder so that you can hear them better. For instance, if your ear has difficulty picking up sounds with higher frequencies, your hearing aid will make sounds with higher frequencies louder so you can hear them better.

But tinnitus can also happen at higher frequencies, just like your hearing loss. Hearing aids assist people with tinnitus by masking the sounds they hear. This feature covers up sounds, whether they are continuous or come and go, with white noise.

When used with hearing aids, tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is also an effective treatment for this condition. TRT teaches a person with tinnitus how to retrain their brain and how they process sounds, giving them a way to block out the noise.