Aging and loud noise exposure aren’t the only causes of hearing loss. It’s quite common to experience hearing loss or noise sensitivity following a head injury, such as a concussion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that over three million concussions occur in the United States annually, yet hearing loss is an underestimated side effect, so let’s bridge that gap and discuss the relationship between concussions and hearing health.
What Is a Concussion?
A concussion is a mild form of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). A major blow to the head, such as during high-contact sports or a car accident, can cause a concussion. The impact of the blow will essentially violently bump the brain around inside the skull. The brain hitting the sides of the cranium will cause bruising on the brain and tear nerve fibers.
When the brain is bruised in this manner, it can cause a wide range of symptoms. The most well-known symptoms are confusion, headaches, nausea, vomiting, vertigo, blurry vision, amnesia and loss of consciousness. However, the brain is the site of many bodily processes—including the auditory process—so injuries and trauma to the brain have even more far-reaching consequences than just these listed.
Impact on Auditory Processing
In the temporal lobe of the brain is the auditory processing center. Your ears send sound information to the temporal lobe, where it is processed and interpreted as sound that you hear. The auditory processing center sorts important sounds from background noise, interprets speech and encodes sounds into memory, among other functions.
If bruising from a concussion happens to or near the temporal lobe, the functionality of the auditory processing center can be severely affected. Even if the ear organ itself did not sustain an injury, the brain will have a decreased ability to process sound it receives from the ear, so it may process sound information slowly or be unable to interpret sound information at all. This will cause muffled hearing or ringing in the ears, and it will make it difficult to locate sound sources or understand speech, especially in environments with lots of background noise.
Treating Hearing Loss
Hearing loss, especially when caused by an injury, must be evaluated and treated as soon as possible. It’s a good idea to connect with an audiologist about the effects of a brain injury on your hearing to mitigate those effects. Commonly, hearing loss after a head injury goes unnoticed and unreported, so it’s essential to be proactive about potential effects. Call Bangor Audiology today to find out more.