You’ll find internationally renowned and compassionate care for conductive hearing loss at Stanford Health Care. We start by identifying the cause of conductive hearing loss. Together, we’ll establish a treatment plan that improves your hearing loss and quality of life as much as possible.
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Symptoms of Conductive Hearing Loss
With conductive hearing loss, you have a sudden or gradual decrease in how well you can hear. These changes in your hearing may be mild or severe, and they can affect one or both ears. You may experience:
- Difficulty hearing quiet sounds
- Muffled hearing of loud sounds
- Feeling like your ear is full or stuffed up
- Liquid draining out of your ear
- Pain or sensitivity inside your ear
- Dizziness or balance problems
Causes of Conductive Hearing Loss
Conductive hearing loss can have many different causes, all of which keep sound from reaching your inner ear. You may have a problem affecting your outer ear or ear canal, such as:
- Bony growths in the ear canal (exostoses, also known as surfer’s ear)
- Ear canal infection, such as otitis externa (swimmer’s ear)
- Foreign objects stuck in the ear canal
- Hardened or built-up earwax (cerumen impaction)
- Microtia (malformation or underdevelopment of the ear since birth) affecting development of the outer ear or ear canal
- Tumor in the ear canal (which may be ear cancer)
You could also have a problem affecting your middle ear, such as:
- An inherited disease of the bone surrounding the inner ear (otosclerosis)
- A skin cyst in the middle ear made of trapped skin cells and debris (cholesteatoma)
- Blockage of the tube connecting the middle ear to the back of the nose (Eustachian tube) (Eustachian tube dysfunction)
- Ear injuries from trauma, including eardrum rupture (tympanic membrane perforation) and movement of the middle ear bones (ossicular dislocation)
- Fluid stuck in the middle ear
- Infection or inflammation of the middle ear (otitis media)
- Microtia affecting development of the ear drum
To diagnose conductive hearing loss, your doctor will do an ear exam and ask about your symptoms and past health conditions. Your doctor may find that you have some hearing loss during a routine visit, or you may come in to the office after noticing symptoms.
Ear exam
Our specialists use a microscope to look inside your ear. Your doctor may see a problem in your ear canal, eardrum, and middle ear.
Hearing tests
If your doctor thinks that you have hearing loss, we do hearing tests to find out how severe it is. Hearing tests look at your response to several aspects of sound, such as tone, pitch, and loudness. You may see an otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat doctor) or an audiologist (hearing specialist) for these tests.
Hearing tests may include:
- Acoustic reflex test (ear muscle reflex test): This test looks at your ear’s automatic response to loud sounds, called the acoustic reflex.
- Pure-tone test: You’ll listen to tones of different pitch and loudness during this test.
- Speech and word recognition tests: This test checks how well you can hear words spoken at different volumes.
- Tuning fork tests: Known as Rinne and Weber tests, tuning fork tests help your doctor know which kind of hearing loss you have.
Tympanometry
Your doctor may use a tympanometry test to look at your eardrum and middle ear function. This test uses bursts of air to change the pressure inside your ear. Your doctor will look at how your eardrum and middle ear respond.
Imaging
Sometimes we need more information after looking inside your ear. You may get a computed tomography (CT) scan or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), depending on what your doctor sees during your ear exam. Imaging especially helps with diagnosing damage or tumors in your ear.
Conductive Hearing Loss
Conductive hearing loss happens when sound can’t reach your inner ear. We figure out the cause and provide world-class conductive hearing loss treatment.
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